The Darkest Night
by Galadriel1010
Summary: Although the crisis with the 456 is over, Torchwood's problems definitely aren't. The government is meddling, Jack is pregnant and they don't trust the team they've been assigned. When they cut loose from Torchwood, things get worse rather than better, and Ianto soon finds himself adrift from his loved ones and on the run, chasing down rumours about Steven's death.
1. Prologue

**Author's Note:** This is a fairly old story that I just realised hasn't been crossposted. written for the Ianto Big Bang in 2010. Beta work by mcparrot, all mistakes by me.

* * *

The ceiling was stark white, and framed by the drape of curtains from a wooden rail. Sunlight filled the room from a window that showed through the curtain on his left, and footsteps from the corridor outside and the gentle beeping of the machines watching over him rang in a syncopated melody. The bedding was soft and warm, gentle to the touch.

It occurred to him to worry that he was in hospital, but warm lethargy and the solid comfort of Jack's hand holding onto his helped his eyes to slip closed again. Snapshots of memories slipped past him, just outside his grasp, and coalesced into a narrative that felt familiar. He forced his eyes open again and looked down at their joined hands on the coverlet. "Apparently it wasn't as lethal as they threatened."

Jack laughed, a hollow, hurt sound, and leaned over to kiss him. "Welcome back." He sat down again without relinquishing Ianto's hand. "Do you want a drink or..."

"Yeah, please." His throat was raw and his voice rough, and talking was painful. He waited for Jack to return with a bottle of water and a straw, and wondered what it said about them that he didn't need to be warned to sip it slowly. "I don't know why, but I wasn't expecting a respiratory disease," he commented when he could.

"It was a combination. Respiratory and circulatory, with added complications if you survived that." Jack put the bottle on a side table and returned to sit on the bed instead of in the chair. "You had to be put on a ventilator because of some of the complications during your recovery."

"Some of them?" He tried to sit up but the ache it caused persuaded him not to try it again. "What happened?"

Jack sighed and lifted Ianto's hand, pressing it against his lips as he spoke. "One of the standard injections you had at Torchwood protected you from the full effects of the virus. Your body still nearly shut down, but you were able to fight the virus off – just, with help from UNIT's doctors." He pulled Ianto's hand away and squeezed it. "It's been a tough month."

"A..." He closed his mouth when he couldn't finish the sentence and just stared at Jack. "How?"

"They had to induce a coma. You were in too much pain to leave you like that." He gave Ianto a smile that looked painful and kissed his hand again. "Rhiannon and Gwen have been here as often as they could, but they couldn't stay."

"No..." Ianto ached, and his mind was sluggish and slow to process the information. He swallowed and flexed his fingers, extending them to brush against Jack's cheek. "Did you... did you stay?"

"All the time." There was something cold and empty in Jack's eyes for a moment, and sadness lingered in them even after he forced a more reassuring smile. "You weren't much of a conversationalist, but I stayed anyway."

"I'm sorry." He smiled up at Jack and squeezed his hand. "Makes up for you being not much of a listener the rest of the time."

"Cheeky." Jack brushed his thumb across Ianto's brow, cupping his cheek in his warm palm. "I'm going to change, I promise. Be a better listener, a better friend." He stilled Ianto's protests by covering his lips with his thumb. "Hear me out. Sitting here, waiting, not knowing if you were going to come back... it was a wake-up call. I only get one chance with you, and I thought I'd wasted it. I'm not going to make that mistake twice."

Ianto let his eyes slip closed and nuzzled his face into Jack's hand. "Are you going to say it this time, then?"

Jack's lips pressed against his forehead. "I love you."

He tried to respond, but weariness dulled it to a mumble against Jack's palm as he slipped back into the warm dark of sleep.

X~X~X~X

After a few days the doctor had let him out of bed to start on the physical therapy that would speed his recovery. He also insisted that Ianto ate in the well-appointed dining room, a luxury afforded to the patients at UNIT's private hospital, Ianto was sure, to torture those whose doctors made them walk back to their rooms. Ianto leaned heavily on Jack, and a nurse followed with the wheelchair he'd used to get down there. She tidied it away whilst Jack sat at the head of the bed and helped Ianto to settle in in front of him, propped up against Jack's chest and the pillows. "You did well today, Ianto," she told him, coming over to check his pulse and ignoring his baleful glare. "Doctor Henson will be really pleased with your progress."

"Oh good." He leaned back against Jack, resting his hands on Jack's arms around his waist, and closed his eyes. "Please tell me dinner will be here?"

"It will." Jack's lips pressed against his neck, just below his ear. "No need to get out of bed until tomorrow."

"Okay." The nurse left them to it, and Ianto wriggled into a more comfortable position that trapped Jack in place behind him. "So..."

"Ianto..."

"No, Jack. Whatever happened to end it, it's upset you, and that upsets me." He covered Jack's hand and held it. "I want to hear it from you, not from the grapevine. No one will bother us for a while now."

"Fine." Jack's arms tightened and he pressed his forehead against the back of Ianto's neck. "The 456 killed Clem with a high frequency telepathic wave that overloaded his brain. Dekker realised that they could use the same frequency and project it back to them." He drew in an unsteady breath that sent a shiver down Ianto's spine and whispered, "They had to use a child to project it."

Understanding slammed into him, driving the air from his lungs, and his fingers dug into Jack's arms. "Steven? Oh God..." He released his painful grip on Jack and rubbed his thumbs across the marks he'd left. "It's not... they didn't..."

"He died," Jack confirmed, voice shaky. "They killed him. And now Alice is missing and..." His voice wavered, and he had to pause before he could plunge on. "I should have been there with them. I should have stopped them and saved him."

Ianto squirmed around in the narrow bed, clinging to Jack to avoid falling off the edge, until he could return the embrace and guide Jack in to lean against him. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Jack." Safe in his embrace, Jack wept against his shoulder, shaking with grief, and Ianto ached for him. He knew that no matter how much Jack survived, how many people he saved, he would always lose them anyway. To lose Steven so young was a cruel reminder tempering Ianto's own survival, and Ianto would have given anything to change places with him, to give Jack a few extra years.

X~X~X~X

Whilst Ianto got stronger and regained musculature and lung capacity, Jack became drawn and pale. At first Ianto mistook it for the result of his grief and guilt and the long hours he'd spent watching over Ianto, but his condition worsened quickly . A few days of bleak depression and flu-like aches gave way to nausea and cramps that blackened his mood even further. He clung to Ianto, wrapped around him in the larger bed they'd eventually persuaded the doctor that they needed, listless and lethargic.

He'd also resisted all Ianto's attempts to persuade him to get help, even anti-nausea medication, until a sleepless night had brought out the worst in Ianto and he'd stormed out of the room - as fast as he could on still-wobbly legs - to hide in the canteen. When he returned, it was to find Jack talking to Doctor Henson, looking thoroughly chastened and waiting for Ianto to come back before he'd allow the doctor to whisk him off to an examination room.

The tests took an hour, everything from untrasound scans to blood tests that would take days to come back with a result. Ianto sat as close to Jack as he was allowed, sometimes close enough to hold his hand and sometimes on the far side of the room, hovering whilst the tests were done. As soon as they were finished he returned to Jack's side and sat on the examination bed next to him, disregarding Doctor Henson's quick glare. The doctor hummed over his notes, a worried frown folding a crease between his eyebrows. Machinery beeped and whirred around them, and the printer spewed out another sheet of records. Ianto bit his lip and squeezed Jack's hand, running a hand up his arm. "It's okay," he assured him. "It's going to be alright."

"Yeah." Jack opened his eyes and smiled up at Ianto. It failed to reach his eyes, and his bitten-sore lower lip trembled. "I'm always alright."

He leaned across and kissed Jack's lower lip, flicking his tongue out to soothe it. Jack's hands grabbed at him and pulled him closer, begging for reassurance in every trembling movement. Ianto ran his fingers through the over-long hair at the nape of his neck. "You're more than alright." He kissed Jack again and pulled back to look at Doctor Henson without apology. "Do you know what's wrong with him?"

Doctor Henson pulled his glasses off and tapped them against his notes. "Captain Harkness, I have to ask; if you would rather we had this conversation in private, now is the time to say so."

"Thank you, but no. I want Ianto here." He looked back at Ianto and squeezed his hand. "It saves one of us repeating it."

"Alright then." Henson sat on the end of the bed, keeping a respectful distance between him and them. "The scans have located a growth in your abdomen. It's developing between your sigmoid colon and your bladder, and its growth is putting pressure on them, which is what caused the discomfort and urinary difficulties."

Jack was staring at him in shock, so Ianto squeezed his hands and looked over at the doctor, squaring his shoulders. "Do you think it's a cancer?"

"We can't be sure yet, of course - not until the blood results come back - but judging by the rate of growth, I think it's likely." He looked at them both, lingering on Jack, who refused to meet his eyes. "As it's Jack, I'm going to recommend surgery as soon as possible, depending on the bloodwork results. We'll know more once we've had the chance to examine it and determine the likelihood of a reoccurrence."

"It's not..." Jack's voice was strained, and he had to clear his throat before he could continue. "I need you to run a pregnancy test on me."

"Pardon?"

"I have the capacity for pregnancy," Jack explained, closing his eyes tightly and turning his face away from Ianto. "I have a dual reproductive system, but it shouldn't be functional! It takes a cocktail of hormones to stabilise my reproductive system and prepare my body..."

Ianto reached out when Jack choked off and rubbed his hand across his back in soothing circles. It took a moment to force back his own shock and find the place where he could reassure Jack, and he used it to slide closer to Jack and press their knees together. "It's okay," he reassured him. "We can get the tests done and find out and then... then."

"Yeah." Jack choked on a laugh and turned back to him, whilst Doctor Henson made a calculated retreat and Ianto thanked his stars for UNIT-trained doctors and their acceptance of ridiculous situations. "I'm sorry; I should have said something. I'm just one lie after another..."

"No, you're not." Ianto rested his forehead against Jack's shoulder and kept rubbing his back. "One surprise after another, though." That got a laugh, and he nosed Jack's shirt collar out of the way to kiss his neck. "It's okay. It's a good thing, or just a thing, but it's something we can deal with, even if..."

"If I don't want to keep it?"

Ianto nodded. "Yeah, even if. Whatever happens, I'll be here."

"I don't know what to do," Jack confessed. He gripped Ianto's hand and stared straight ahead at the wall. "If... if it's a baby, our baby. Your baby. I don't want to lose it. Already, I don't want to lose it. But I'll lose you anyway, both of you and I can't... Ianto, I can't have another Alice."

"You won't," he promised. When Jack grunted, Ianto wrapped his arms around his waist and hugged him from behind. "Let Doctor Henson help you feel better first. Then we can make a decision when you're not feeling like shit."

"Eloquent as always." Jack turned his head to demand a kiss. "Don't leave me."

"Never." He granted Jack the kiss and held him tighter whilst they waited for the doctor to return.


	2. Chapter 1

An easy peace settled over the street in the late morning now that the children had returned to school after the long summer holiday. A bus rumbled past down the road, disturbing a group of sparrows from a hedge and attracting the attention of a cat sunning itself on the low wall surrounding the park. Beyond the wall the grass was scattered with blossom that drifted from the shady cherry trees, dahlias nodded in the borders between rose bushes heavy with flower, and barely a ripple disturbed the surface of the lake between the water lilies.

The post van came down a side street and stopped just before the corner. Under the watchful eye of the cat on the wall, and accompanied now by the sharp barks of an unseen dog, the postman made his way up one garden path after another. When he got down to the street that ran along the edge of the park the cat jumped from its wall and went across the road to fuss for attention, and he stopped outside the gate to stroke it. Before he could enter, the front door had opened, and a young man emerged to blink in the bright sunlight. "Morning," he called when he spotted the postman, coming down the path to meet him and collect his post. "Beautiful day."

"It is that," he agreed, selecting the items for delivery to this house. "Your Tybalt's got the right idea, sunning himself on that wall every day."

"He's got us right where he wants us," the young man scoffed, collecting the post for Mr. I. Jones and Mr. J. Harkness of Lake Road East. "He'll come in to be fed and then go back to that wall until it goes dark. It's a hard life, isn't it, Monster?"

"I reckon they're aliens, you know? Come to Earth to enslave us millennia ago, and we've been in their thrall ever since." He shifted his satchel with a grimace and waved to the twitching curtain in the next house. "Did you see that on the news this morning?"

"See what?" Ianto looked up from the post and frowned. "I've not even turned the coffee machine on today."

"Oh, well apparently it's all true. Aliens, I mean," he imparted, inflating his chest and raising his chin. "There's going to be a press conference of some sorts at ten. Torchwood stuff. Not that it'll come as news to anyone here, eh? We've known for years. Take care, Mr Jones. Better go make a coffee for your old man."

"Yeah..." He waved the forgotten post and scooped Tybalt up from under his feet, hurrying back into the house. Inside, the furnishings showed the compromises between two very different schools of interior design. The original tiling had been preserved in the porch and around the fireplace in the living room, above which hung a television that took up the whole of the chimney breast. The fireplace was flanked by two deep leather and wood armchairs and faced by a matching sofa, and a tile and chrome coffee table next to the sofa was covered with classic car magazines and a holiday brochure.

He set Tybalt loose and hovered at the bottom of the stairs, but rather than go up or call up he hurried back into the living room, where the TV had stopped showing photographs and had tuned into the BBC's 24 hour news channel. The familiar breakfast presenter was reporting on the worries caused by rising gas prices, but Ianto's attention was fixed on the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen that read like something out of his nightmares. Any minute now he was going to wake up screaming.

Half an hour later he was still glued to the TV, fist clenched around the phone with his nails biting into his palm confirming that he was awake. Heavy footsteps, muffled by the thick carpet, clumped down the stairs and then padded into the kitchen. Tybalt leapt from the armchair to follow him and beg for another breakfast and Ianto twitched at the movement, his hand inching towards the remote and his protective instincts, kicking into overdrive, urging him to turn it off. In the end he left it, sinking down in his seat and glaring at the TV, caught in the juxtaposition between the personal idyll of Jack singing and cooking himself breakfast in the kitchen and the professional disaster unfolding on the news.

"I am having the strongest craving for coffee right now," Jack told him as he entered, mouth half-full of bread. "I don't understand it."

"That's not a craving," he answered on auto-pilot, "that's just your caffeine addiction kicking in. Doctor says you're not to drink it, and who am I to argue?"

"First one, usually." Jack dropped onto the sofa, swung his legs up so that his feet were in Ianto's lap and wriggled his toes. "What's up? Rising gas prices aren't..."

"Give it five minutes, it'll come around again," he snapped. When Jack gave him a wounded look Ianto sighed and started rubbing his thumbs up the arches of Jack's feet. "Sorry, it's... oh, you'll understand."

Jack sat up and leaned into Ianto, stuffing the last of his sandwich into his mouth and leaning across to put the plate on the table. Ianto could have been deaf and blind and he would have known the moment that the story returned to them, because Jack tensed next to him and spluttered. "What the hell?"

"That's what I said. No one's answering my calls, Gwen's had the police calling her all morning and can't get any answer out of Downing Street either. This isn't an accident or an oversight," he growled.

"They know why we're not ready to go open," Jack muttered, splaying a broad hand over his flat stomach. "Are they doing it on purpose, do you think?"

Ianto reached over and covered Jack's hand with his own. The presenter was doing the lead-up to the live press conference, and he couldn't bring himself to lie to Jack even to reassure him.

_"And we're crossing live now to Thames House, the site of the terrible tragedy just last month, and now, we hope, the start of a truly new world."_

The image changed to a view of a room full of journalists and a long table, behind which sat the Defence Minister, Edward Constant; his head advisor on Torchwood and UNIT matters, Bridget Spears; a civil service spokesman they didn't recognise and a UNIT defector called Angela Pierce. Ianto felt Jack's hand tighten, and a moment later he realised that the room they were sitting in was the room where he had nearly died. "Over a hundred people," he gritted out, "and a cheap point scoring opportunity."

_"The Torchwood Institute has been protecting Britain from extra-terrestrial threats for over one hundred years,"_ Constant explained to the gathered journalists and the wider audience watching on TV, "_since it was founded by Queen Victoria. For most of that time its scope has been limited to minor outposts with low levels of activity, but in recent years the threat has grown to levels which can no longer be ignored and which it is no longer beneficial to keep a secret. I must stress at this point that the secrecy of the organisation was a defensive act in itself, which ensured the protection of powerful extraterrestrial organisations. The devastating losses suffered here at Thames House, however, are a clear sign that that protection is no longer sufficient, and therefore we are prepared to move forwards into the open. This will bring with it an increased risk of attack, but with increased visibility we also gain an increased ability to defend ourselves._

"Torchwood will continue to act from the current outpost in Cardiff, where the population is largely aware of their existence due to the work of the current team, and from a base here in London which will be a fast response unit covering the rest of the country." He tidied the script in front of him and looked out over his audience. _"I'm sure you have a lot of questions, and I'll be happy to answer any. Some, however, will still fall under the purview of the Official Secrets Act."_

The camera panned over the audience and Ianto scoured the faces for one he knew, sagging back into the sofa when he found her. "Sarah Jane's there," he explained when Jack looked around at him. "Turn it off; I can't listen to him any more."

Silence descended and they both glared at the blank screen for a long moment. It was broken by the shrill scream of the phone, still clutched in Ianto's hand, and he answered it without thought. "Harkness-Jones, Ianto speaking."

_"Ianto, did you see..."_

"Yes, we saw it." He mouthed 'Gwen' at Jack and stood up to pace behind the sofa, leaving Jack leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees. "We just got fucked over." From the corner of his eye he saw Jack flinch, and he paused to lay a hand on his shoulder. "Are you still watching it?"

_"No, Rhys turned it off because I tried to throw my shoe through the TV. Was anyone we know there?"_

"Sarah Jane was there," he said with heartfelt relief. "She'll call us when it's finished and she's got as much as she can. Did you hear his 'due to the work of the current team'? Bastard."

Gwen cursed down the line and he heard a soft thump from Gwen's arthritic sofa. _"What do we do now?"_

He looked down at Jack, then closed his eyes and tipped his face back to the ceiling. "We wait for them to decide what to do with us. We'd better get off the line, in case someone calls."

"Yeah, of course." Gwen hesitated though. "Are you two okay?"

"We're fine." He sighed and shrugged to himself. "Well, as fine as we can be. Look, why don't you come over?"

"Are you sure?"

Ianto could hear her scrambling around her living room, and he smiled at her eagerness. "Yep. Better than going to the office. Bring lunch with you," he added.

"Okay. The usual?" A door slammed and Gwen's feet echoed down the stairs. "I'll see you soon."

He rang off and stared at the phone in his hand. Jack was watching him, and he met his gaze with an equally worried look. "I'm going to call Samantha and get us a meeting with him tomorrow," he said at last. "We'll go by train."

Jack watched him with narrowed eyes. "Wait... you have Samantha on speed-dial?"

"Yep," he held his hand up to stop Jack and listened to the phone ring. "I make friends easily. Samantha, it's Ianto. We need to see Constant tomorrow. Can you book us in without letting him know about it?" He waited for her to confirm it and agreed on a time. "Okay, two o'clock, then. We'll see you tomorrow."

He flopped onto the sofa again and turned the news back on whilst Jack booked them train tickets. The question session was still ongoing, but the rolling news had moved on and he'd have to press the red button to watch more of it. Jack rested a hand on his leg and squeezed. "It'll be alright," he promised. "Pierce will take over London, we'll sever all contact and go back below the radar. And if that fails, we'll take a transfer to the Bermuda monitoring station."

Ianto chuckled and leaned his head against Jack's. "We have plenty of options," he agreed. "We have to plan for three, though."

"Let's focus on tomorrow," Jack said after a moment, but his voice was lighter. "Everything else can happen after."

X~X~X~X

Ianto's phone buzzed as soon as they got out of the station onto street level, informing him of arriving messages. He checked them as they walked, and relied on Jack to steer them through the heavy foot traffic along the embankment. The brief period on the underground without signal had been a respite from an unending stream of calls and emails that had begun at the end of the press conference the day before. At first it had been their friends calling them to ask what was going on, if they were alright, if they'd seen it, was there anything they could do? By the time they unplugged the phone and went to bed, though, the media had got hold of their number and were 'requesting' interviews and comments whilst already running intrusive stories about their private lives.

A policeman waved them into the Ministry of Defence's main building on Whitehall and he realised that they'd walked farther than he thought. Jack was putting his ID away, and he gave Ianto a tired smile as they climbed the short marble staircase into the foyer. "Anything interesting?"

"Not really." He let Jack precede him to the desk and hovered behind him.

"Hi," Jack glanced over his shoulder at Ianto and he nodded, confirming that the secretary was new. "We have an appointment with Constant."

"Right, sir…" Her fingers rattled over the keyboard and she frowned. "I'm sorry, it's not on the… right, yes, I'll just call up and tell him you're here." Once more, Jack's expression stopped her in her tracks and she lifted her hand from the phone handset. "Second door on the left down the corridor," she finished in a small voice.

Jack nodded and followed her directions with Ianto close behind him as always. His coat billowed as he pushed the double doors open and strode into the room. Whilst he sat down, uninvited, in the seat across the desk from Constant, Ianto closed the doors securely and took up a position next to them, leaning on the wall with his hands tucked into his pockets. Apart from a short glance up when they burst into the room, Constant kept his eyes on his work and carried on as he had been doing, letting the harsh clatter of his keyboard be the only thing to break the stalemate.

They glanced at each other once more and then Jack reached across and pulled the power cable out of the back of the monitor. He waved it at Constant and held it out of reach. "It's only the monitor," he told him cheerfully, "so you can get back to work as soon as we've gone. It's rude to ignore your guests, though. How about some coffee? Ianto?"

"That would be nice," he agreed. "Or brandy? It's been a Hell of a day."

Constant folded his hands in front of him on the desk and ignored Ianto. "It's also rude to enter someone's office uninvited, but I shouldn't have expected you to pay heed to that, Harkness."

"Well, we did book an appointment." Jack held his hand to his mouth in mock shock. "Oh, but we didn't pass the message on, did we? Oh well, we're here now, so no harm done." He swung his feet up onto the desk and kept swinging the power lead. "That was some press conference yesterday; I liked your injured offence and earnestness in particular. With acting talent like that you're wasted in government."

Ianto found a bottle of port in the drinks cabinet and poured two small glasses out, approaching the desk to hand one to Jack. "It brought to mind Jennifer Anniston and Gerard Butler in the Bounty Hunter."

Constant raised an eyebrow, looking bewildered. "More Gerard Butler, I hope."

"Nope." He sipped at the port and raised the glass in a salute. "This is an excellent vintage. I must make a note of it."

"It was a gift," Constant said, lacing the words with polite venom, "from my wife on my appointment to office."

"Well, please pass my compliments to your wife, then."

"What do you want?" He leaned back in his chair and looked at both of them. "Yesterday's press conference was nothing to do with you; it was about London and the organisation as a whole, not individual locations."

"We did watch it," Jack told him, sneering. "We got your messages loud and clear. Oh, and whilst we're at it, who leaked our home number to the press."

Constant's hands fluttered across the desk and came to rest in his lap again. "I don't know, but I assure you that I'll find out. Such an invasion of privacy should never have happened, and we will do everything to minimise the consequences for you, of course."

"Of course," Jack mimicked. "Why did you choose yesterday to go public? We haven't finished discussing what's going to happen yet. Unless that was something else that happened without us."

"As I said, the details of the relaunch in London are fully under control and something you don't need to worry about. Cardiff is your jurisdiction and will remain so." He smiled and spread his hands. "But Torchwood must move forwards, and I hope that by focussing on London we will give you the space, opportunity and funding to redevelop the Cardiff facilities."

"You don't know the first thing about Torchwood," Jack snapped. "And that conference was not about Torchwood. It was about an entirely new organisation with the Torchwood name slapped on it and with you in charge."

"Change happens…"

"We made our position perfectly clear." Jack rose from his chair and slammed his hands down on the desk, leaning forwards with his palms planted on their side of Constant's hands and towering over him. "We're not ready for the public to know about us, and now we might never be ready."

"Captain Harkness, please calm down." Constant sighed and leaned back out of Jack's reach, flicking a glance down Jack's body to his flat abdomen. "I think that your hormones are clouding your judgement somewhat. You know that personal concerns can't stand in the way of the country's safety ."

Jack bristled but Ianto answered for him, stamping down on his own anger. "This is about more than us and you know it. All three surviving Torchwood operatives are preparing for unexpected parenthood and therefore in no position to train replacements, and I didn't hear you mentioning the fact that Torchwood is currently just me and the car because an as-yet unidentified government organisation who you should but apparently don't have control of destroyed our base to stop us doing our jobs during the last crisis. Maybe you'll let us know about the next press conference in advance and we can raise the issue?"

"Our investigation is continuing, and it would have been unwise to comment on the on-going investigation when it would have lost us any element of surprise we may have." Constant's tongue darted out like a snake's and flicked across his lips. "As to your limited man power, Sergeant Pierce will report to Cardiff on Monday with a team to support you. She will be your second in command, Harkness, and you can train her up to cover your maternity leave."

"Ianto is my second in command." Jack looked over his shoulder at Ianto and fixed him with a glare that dared him to disagree, something he had no intention of doing. "I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it, and certainly not someone with no experience of the job."

"Well you'll have to get used to it." Constant straightened his tie and glared at Jack's hands. "Sergeant Pierce will report to Cardiff's hub on Monday with her team and that is the end of it. I am fed up with your stalling, and Cardiff needs better. You'd better get over your issues quickly, because Torchwood will move forwards with or without you."

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Jack exploded. "How dare you?"

"Captain Harkness, I am your employer. Since the Thames House Ordinance, Torchwood answers to this department, and you would be wise to remember that. Look, I've consulted you as much as I could, and your experience and input has been invaluable, but there comes a point where we have to move forwards, not be scared of the future." He sighed and stood up. "I understand that this is a trying time for you, and all I'm doing is trying to make the change-over as easy for you as possible. Angela will be with you on Monday, and then the risk to Mr Jones and to your baby will be much less and maybe you'll be able to think about things rationally."

Jack balled his fists and rested the knuckles on the desk top. "Torchwood doesn't do weekends. Tell her we expect her at work tomorrow morning."

He swept out before Constant could say anything, and Ianto stepped closer to the desk. "If you send the files on the new recruits across to us I should be able to get them into the system and get them access to at least the archives tonight. Of course, I can't promise anything, but it'll be a start."

"You could just tell him you need more time," Constant suggested, not deigning to look up at Ianto.

"Not at all. I agree with him, we need them there as soon as possible so that they can start covering for Jack and Gwen. Once they arrive Gwen can finish setting their accounts up, but we'll need at least a couple of them to be able to get onto the computer system tomorrow morning." He smiled mildly and turned for the door. "Thanks for the port, Edward. Hopefully we won't see you again for a long time."

The door swung shut behind him with a satisfying thump, and he looked up and down the corridor for Jack. A harried looking aide came scurrying down the corridor towards him, clutching a lever-arch folder like a shield in front of him and casting glances over his shoulder, and Ianto guessed that Jack was the reason for his expression. He eventually found him in a vacant office, sitting on the edge of the desk and studying the empty bookcase. Ianto sat next to him, resting his hand between them so that their little fingers touched. "There's always Bermuda," he suggested.

Jack laughed and shifted his little finger over so that it hooked over Ianto's. "No. Not yet. Not until we know that there's someone in Cardiff that we can trust." He sighed and tipped his head back. "I've looked after that city for too long. Gone native."

"Could be worse." Ianto bumped his shoulder against Jack's and got to his feet. "We've got a while before the train. Do you want to look some more people up?"

He considered it and then shook his head, getting up to join Ianto so they could leave. "No. Let's get lunch and charge it to Constant. I'm in the mood for some petty bureaucracy."

"I've been a good influence on you," Ianto commented, stopping at the desk to write a note for Constant's secretary and another for the secretary on the main desk informing them both of the lunch bill that would cross their desks. "We owe Samantha at least dinner for that one, by the way."

"Of course." Jack offered his arm and they strolled out into the sunshine again, breaking apart almost immediately to navigate the crowd. A moment later, though, Ianto felt Jack take his hand, and he tightened his grip in response .

X~X~X~X

The next morning dawned cloudy, and they hurried in to work far earlier than they normally would have, thanks to Jack's brash demands. After they got back to Cardiff they had spent a few hours setting up just enough details on the systems to make it look like they'd made an effort and then set about changing all the passwords, entry codes and database access protocols. Half an hour before they'd instructed the team to arrive, the proximity alarms on the car park went off and Jack switched on the CCTV. Ianto hurried across to join him, and they watched the new arrivals scouting out the area and even placing a couple of bugs around the car park. They glanced at each other and Ianto flicked an eyebrow in acknowledgement.

They watched the team come closer to the main door. Once they were in sight of the main cameras, Ianto went to wait by the door. He watched Jack, who watched the CCTV, and at Jack's signal he opened the door and stepped back to let the team in. Angela Pierce brushed past him after a momentary hesitation with barely a glance, but the others lingered longer in the doorway and looked him over, distaste or sincere curiosity written across their features. "Come in," he said as they swanned past him. "We're just getting your details entered into the computer system so that we can begin – we weren't expecting you this early, otherwise we'd be ready." By the time he finished he was already talking to himself, so he closed the door and locked it again before he followed them over to the office of the warehouse.

When he got there Jack was nose-to-nose with Pierce, ordering her back out into the main space and holding Ianto's chair under the desk, preventing her from pulling it out and sitting down. They looked around when he entered, Jack with simple acknowledgement and Pierce with clear animosity. "Jones, you're going to have to move your things out onto one of the other desks," she instructed. "I'm moving into this office with Captain Harkness."

"You're very antagonistic, considering that this is your first day in the job, I'm higher up the chain of command than you are, and I have a jar of Retcon in my pocket." He came around the desk and smiled when Jack pulled his chair out for him. "So I suggest you get settled in at your desk in the main office. Breakfast will be delivered at just before eight, and by then Gwen should be here and we'll be ready to give you the orientation."

"We were prepared to give you a chance," Jack told her, returning to his own desk. "And you blew it. Ianto is my second in command, and when I go on paternity leave he will be first in command. Deal with it."

She snapped her mouth shut and stormed out, slamming the door behind her. At his desk, Ianto reached for his keyboard and brought up the CCTV from the main room. "They're mercenaries," he growled whilst they gathered in a huddle between the desks. "There's too many of them for us to deal with as well. What are we going to do?"

"I don't know." Jack tried to smile at him and suggested, "We could just leave."

"No we couldn't." The group on his screen were gesticulating towards the office, and one threw himself into a chair and drew his gun to check it. "They brought their own weapons. You don't think..."

"No. We'd be dead if that's what they wanted," Jack said. "We'll confiscate the weapons and lock them up. Preferably at the bottom of the Bay. Set up a rota so we've only got three of them at a time, put Pierce on a swinging shift to keep her on edge and off her game, and restrict their archive access." He tightened his hand into a fist and stared at the wall. "We'll weather this somehow."

"And if we can't?" Ianto couldn't look at him. "What if this is too big for us ?"

"Hey, don't think like that." Jack got up and came around to squeeze Ianto's shoulders. "We are Torchwood. Nothing can stop that."

"Not reassuring," he teased, reaching up to cover one of Jack's hands with his own. "You're right though. It's early, I'm just worrying unnecessarily."

"You are." Jack failed to sound like he believed himself. "Let's get this story rolling."

Gwen arrived a few minutes later, breaking up the huddle in the main office. She threw her lightweight coat onto the stand and introduced herself to the new team, settled behind her desk with her feet on its surface. They relaxed around her and a few of them started chatting with her, but Angela kept apart from them with two others, fixing her glare on Gwen and occasionally flicking glances at the closed door. Ianto made a note of Pierce's apparent allies and began to set them on separate shifts on the rota, but he was disturbed by the arrival of breakfast.

He'd arranged for their favoured bakery to deliver a selection platter of their sweet pastries and a stack of bacon sandwiches, and he went out to collect them from the van. When he returned, Gwen had adopted her position by the presentation board with the new arrivals at the conference table in front of her, and Jack was standing right at the back, trying not to laugh and holding onto the stack of orientation folders. Ianto set the trays down on the table, retrieved the bags that held his, Jack's and Gwen's specific orders and, despite his irritation, kept a close eye on the team's selections for future reference. Gwen accepted her breakfast gratefully and put down the pen that she'd been gesturing with. "Breakfast orders are taken the night before," she told the new team members. "Don't forget or you'll go without."

"Ianto's the man to tell what you want for breakfast," Jack told them, making them all crane around to see him. "He's the one who deals with all deliveries from food to archived materials, the one in charge of the computer system and the archives, the one who keeps the vehicles ticking over and, as if that weren't enough, the one who pays your wages." He looked over at Ianto and gave him a genuine smile. "Whatever you need, you probably need Ianto. Come to him first, because if you come to Gwen or me we'll probably just point you in his direction."

"I do my best." He returned Jack's smile and nodded at the team. "I'm Jack's second in command, and the primary administrator. Everything comes through me, so if your reports aren't on time you won't leave work until they're done, because I haven't got time to deal with them." Several of them sat up straighter, and he smiled in acknowledgement. "I know it's boring and the last thing anyone wants to do at the end of a long day, but it needs doing and no one's going to do it for you."

"It really is important," Gwen agreed. "We don't run on paperwork but it keeps the budget coming, so if you want to get paid you get your reports in."

"Everything needs to be double printed and filed electronically as well." He eyed them and decided to risk showing some of their hand. "Downing Street have been a lot pissier about us keeping our archive safely since they blew us up."

Some of the recruits looked surprised, and Pierce did a reasonable job of pretending. One of the new team, a former gang member from Bradford with a criminal record not far different from Ianto's, stuttered over asking, "They blew... it was the government?"

"Yes, and we still don't know why," Jack told him, daring Sergeant Pierce to say something. "They probably won't do it again, not now they got through the legislation they wanted. The government wants you here because they think they own you. Now there's not much we can do about that, apart from make the best of it. Torchwood is a job for life. It is a job that claims lives. If you manage five years you're doing well, and if you manage ten you're a miracle. You do what I tell you when I tell you and your life expectancy improves; but if you think that you know better than me you walk out that door now, because, whilst I don't care about you putting yourself in danger, I care about this city and I will not see it put in danger by egos."

Ianto took the folders from him and started passing them out. "These folders contain everything you need to know: your pass codes, archival procedures, evacuation procedures, historical activity records, maps of Cardiff... read it all and learn it. We don't do exams, but we will test you every single day until we know we can rely on you. Understand?" There was a chorus of agreement, and he stepped back. "Good. Now enjoy your breakfast and get settled in. If you need anything you can find me in our office."

He followed Jack back into the office and went straight to the coffee machine to put on enough for the whole team. Behind him, Jack paced with short, quick steps, coming to a stop behind Ianto, where he rested his hands on Ianto's hips. "Do you think they'll do?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "Some of them could be alright, but it depends on whether they're loyal to Pierce or to Britain. Or to themselves. We'll win over the last two, but if they're loyal to her and Constant then we're... screwed."

Jack wrapped his arms around Ianto fully and squeezed him. "I'm charming enough to win anyone over," he insisted with false bonhomie. "It'll be fine. Now get the masses their coffee and eat your breakfast before it goes cold."

X~X~X~X

The month end came two weeks after the team arrived, and Ianto found himself buried under even more paperwork than usual. He yawned hugely, too tired even to think about covering it. He was safe from Jack seeing him, settled on the sofa in the main office with the final version of the monthly finance report, but Asim spotted him and stood up to holler, "Boss, take Ianto home! He's nearly asleep already."

He glared at Asim and snuggled deeper into the sofa. "I'm fine, Jack." He didn't need to look up to know that Jack would have come when Asim called him. "I just need to finish this…"

"No you don't." Jack snatched it off him and Ianto let his hands fall to his lap, eyes closing with frustrated exhaustion. "It can go to Constant like that. Let him figure it out." He sat down on the sofa next to Ianto and rubbed his hand over his back. "Hey, let's get you home."

"Yeah…" He blinked his eyes open again and looked around as if for the first time. "Let me get my things, and I'll be ready to go."

"Let me," Jack insisted. "You stay here, I'll get the things, and then we'll pour you into bed."

He chuckled and forced his eyes to stay open to watch Jack go, then levered himself off the sofa and meandered over to Asim's desk. They had few friends in the new team and fewer people they felt they could trust, but Asim had been the first to make it onto both lists. He had a quick wit, less dry than Ianto's but nowhere near as bawdy as either of them either, scattered brightly coloured pens across his desk, locked himself in the bathroom to pray, and was in a happy arranged marriage with a primary school teacher. He cared about what he saw and the people they helped and kept the team that Jack had assigned him to lead organised and looked after. Ianto plonked himself on the edge of his desk and stole a Skittle from the jar next to the monitor. "Are you going to be alright without us?"

"My sweets will be safer." He paused and looked up at Ianto, dark eyes narrowing. "Are you taking a couple of days off or something?"

"Yeah," he said, although he wasn't sure yet where they were going. "I'm exhausted, and Jack needs to slow down for the baby. Just a few days. The monitor's predicting quiet, we trust you… you're in charge whilst we're gone."

"Really?" He sat back and glanced at the empty desk against the wall, where Pierce worked with her back to the room and a mirror propped up on the desk in front of her. "But what about Ms. Pierce?" Ianto raised an eloquent eyebrow and Asim grinned back at him. "Gotcha. Enjoy your break, then."

"We will. Look after them for us." He pushed off the desk, grabbing another Skittle on his way, and followed Jack into the office. Jack was at his own desk, finishing off on clearing out his email inbox, and looked up when Ianto closed the door. "We're getting out of here," he said without preamble. "I'm tired of looking over my shoulder all the time, I'm tired of not being able to eat or sleep for worrying, and I'm tired of fucking Pierce and her superiority complex." He slammed his desk drawer open, grabbed a bag and started collecting his personal effects and everything he thought he might need .

Jack's hands landed on his shoulders, tender and gentle, and he pulled Ianto back against him. "Hey," he shushed him until Ianto stopped struggling. "You're exhausted. Maybe we should take a couple of days, get ourselves together. You'll feel better then ."

He sighed and pulled out of Jack's hands. "No I won't." He put the last things in his bag and set about locking down his computer. "We'd still have to come back to work. Come back here… It's not the same any more, Jack."

"I know." Jack went to his own desk and did the same as Ianto, emptying his bottom drawer into his coat pockets. Neither of them had much left to keep at work after the Hub had been destroyed, but he still hoped that the excavation teams would find something when they got down to Jack's bunker. It should have been safe, but there were no guarantees. Jack's voice broke through his musings, startling him back into the new, sterile office. "Ianto, you're asleep on your feet. You should have said something hours ago."

"I'm used to being able to sleep at work," he apologised . "And I'll sleep better tonight."

"Am I supposed to believe that?" Jack took the bag from him and guided him out with a hand on his hip. "Night guys. Asim, you're…"

"Yeah, Ianto told me." He waved to them and put down what he was doing. "Have a good break. You both look like you need it."

"You say the nicest things," Jack drawled. "Okay kids, play nicely for Uncle Nazir whilst we're gone. Do your homework, get to bed on time and eat your greens."

"You sound like my nan," Ben muttered into his computer. "Have a good weekend. In the middle of the week."

Ianto grabbed Jack's hand and dragged him out into the cold night before he could get into another discussion about semantics. The weather had turned in the last fortnight, and the nights were now damp and chilly, with mist drifting in off the Bay to blanket the streets. They walked to the car in silence and Ianto got into the passenger seat without argument, leaning his head against the headrest and closing his eyes. "I'm going straight to bed when we get in," he told the darkness. "And in the morning I'm going to have a long, hot bath and a fry-up."

"And then?" Jack's hand rested on his leg, warm through the fabric of his suit trousers. "What are you going to do after that?"

He opened one eye and looked up at where the bug was concealed in the visor. "I'm going to take you to bed and make love to you very, very slowly, until you're screaming at me to do something."

"That sounds good." Jack's voice was suddenly strained, but rolling with warm humour. "We could do that in the bath."

"Nope. Quick and dirty in the bath. Water and bubbles all over the floor for me to mop up whilst you do breakfast." He growled at the ceiling. "Weevils. Weevils and hoixes and sewers."

"Way to kill the mood, Ianto…" Jack's hand slid up Ianto's thigh and Ianto pushed it away. "Good point. Want me to pick up something hot and chocolatey before we get home?"

He shook his head and let his eyes close again. "Just get me home."

X~X~X~X

Cold air woke him up, and he blinked up into Jack's face, leaning over him through the open car door. "We're home," Jack told him, "and the nice doctor tells me I'm not supposed to carry anything heavy anymore."

"I wouldn't trust you to carry me without nutting me on the doorframe, anyway." He groaned as he levered himself from the car and arched his back. "The bed is made, right? Right…" Jack followed him into the house and up the stairs, and went into the bathroom whilst Ianto undressed and shifted the cat off the pillow. He joined Jack for just long enough to brush his team, wrapping one arm around his waist and leaning against him, and then wove back to the bed, moved Tybalt off the pillow again, and slid under the covers .

As tired as he was, now that he was in bed his mind just wouldn't stop. He knew everything that could go wrong with this, every reason it was a bad idea, but he could see no other choice. When Jack got into bed on the other side, Ianto immediately slid over to him and tucked himself into the crook of Jack's arm, wrapping an arm around him and curling close. Branches rattled against the window, and he shivered despite the heat Jack was giving out. "It'll be okay," Jack promised. "We'll be okay. We'll go to the farm for a bit, enjoy the space and the quiet, and then we can decide what we're going to do from there."

"I love you." He closed his eyes tightly and tightened his grip on Jack. "Maybe you're right," he conceded, knowing he wasn't. "Maybe we just need a bit of space…"

Jack's lips pressed against his forehead, and he finally let himself relax. He was aware of Jack murmuring, but it was nothing more than a noise as he finally relaxed into the sleep he so badly needed.

X~X~X~X

Ianto waited in the window seat, balancing a notepad on his lap with a half-finished shopping list scrawled untidily across it and watching cars going past. He peered at every vehicle, scanned the park beyond and studied the bushes whenever they twitched. The gentle tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the hall chimed against his already fraught nerves, and his skin grew clammy with cold sweat. When the familiar dark blue of their Jaguar estate came into view and pulled up in front of the house, he still couldn't relax until Jack got out and he saw for himself that he was home. He wiped his hands off on his trousers and dropped the shopping list on the window seat so that he could help Jack bring in the boxes he'd returned with. "Next time," he said as he jogged down the path, "I'm going with you."

"Why?" Jack looked him up and down and shook his head. "Ianto, you're paranoid."

"It's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you." He clicked his tongue at Tybalt and lifted him up into the box one-handed to bring him into the house. "What have you got for us, anyway?"

They set the boxes down on the kitchen table, and Jack started emptying them, explaining as he did so. "I know we're not planning on going for long, but just in case… I got these ready when you were still in hospital, once we started preparing for reopening Torchwood. Officially they're in the Hub, and they're on the inventory lists but not on a tracker record. I stashed them at the empty flat – speaking of which, if we get someone in to do the work on it and give them one of our accounts, they'll probably skip the country and lead Constant and Pierce on a bit of a wild-goose chase."

"Remind me who's paranoid again?" Ianto looked up at him and smiled. "Good thinking. I'll do some casual browsing for distant destinations this evening. And drag."

"Drag?"

"Well, if we were to end up in some distant corner of Africa one of us would have to be a woman, and it might as well be the pregnant one." He gestured into the boxes and headed back to the window. "I'll just get the notebook."

He scooped the notebook up from where it had fallen and fished the pen out from under the chair. When he straightened up he took a last glance out of the window and froze at the sight of a car pulling to a halt across the road. It stayed there for a while and the driver scanned the doors down the street, then leaned over to fiddle with something on the dashboard and, finally, moved on. "Just looking for an address," Ianto told himself. "It's these streets; they all have the same name."

"What was that?" Ianto spun around to face Jack, who was in the doorway, passing a mobile phone from hand to hand. "You said something, but I didn't hear it."

"Talking to myself," he assured him, darting a glance outside again. "Just… paranoid."

Jack came up behind him and rested a hand on his waist. "We'll get out of here soon," he promised, lips pressed against the back of his neck. "Come see what I've brought for us, then we'll go out for dinner, make like everything's normal, pick up some supplies at Tesco on the way home, and we'll leave before dawn."

"Yeah." He smiled back at Jack and turned to follow him back into the kitchen. "What shiny have you got for me, then?"

"Stack of tablets. I got a dozen of the TufTab and kept three of them. I know you hate Vista, but it's droppable, not GPS activated and also not SIM activated, so it's wifi or nothing." He tapped the black cases underneath. "And I saved us two of the field kits. Fully kitted out with bugs, substance tester, wire tapping, the works. All of them are running TOR, as well."

"Excellent." He jotted them down and looked into the box. "Phones?"

"Got you a BlackBerry from a second hand shop, because you're a slave to your brands, but you can have a selection of SIM cards to go with it and it's not on the records. Also got a load of basic model phones. Two sets of travel adaptors with a variety of ends to charge up everything we have here." He stacked those on top of the cases and waited whilst Ianto jotted them all down. "That's the first box. Over here we have the under-the-counter stuff. Magnetic lock-pick device, secure GPS device and trackers, guns, small-scale explosives…"

"You brought those into the kitchen!"

"Relax," Jack scoffed. "They're each in an individual containment box, perfectly safe."

"You said that about sex without a condom." He glanced at Jack's stomach and smiled when he spread a hand across it. "And I'm not saying it was a bad thing, but you were clearly wrong."

"I don't know why I put up with you." Jack put the weapons back in the box and hefted it onto his hip. "Let's get these packed up nice and hidden, and you can decide what we're taking out of the wardrobe. Not everything," he warned. "We've got to make it look like we're coming back if anyone comes to check , just in case they decide to send out a search party."

Ianto shivered at the idea and glanced over his shoulder once more. The kitchen was peaceful, as it should be, and he followed Jack up the stairs to their bedroom, where Jack already had the suitcases out from the airing cupboard and was unpacking the bags from them. "How many bags are we taking, then?"

"Put the cases and a hold-all in the boot, two more hold-alls on the back seat," Jack told him. "As long as no one sees us putting the stuff in the boot it'll look like we're only taking the hold-alls."

"Okay." He stood with his hands on his hips and nodded at the bed. "Weapons in the reinforced case, please. I'll start on the clothes. We can put the laptops in the in-car bags as well."

They packed in comfortable silence, broken occasionally by quiet murmurs of questions or requests. Ianto left most of his suits where they were, packing only the ones that crumpled least, and filled the bags instead with jeans and T-shirts, jumpers and jogging bottoms, comfortable clothes suited to colder weather. He filled the two bags with clothes, finishing in time to help Jack choose books and DVDs to go in the cases with the explosives. "There's not much left to pack," he pointed out as he added a couple of Pratchett books to one of the cases. "Just the stuff we'll need overnight and the cat. We can get this stuff into the car and then go out."

Jack frowned and looked over at the pillow. "We're taking the cat?"

"Well I'm not leaving him behind." Ianto gathered Tybalt up and cradled him in his arms. "He'd miss us, wouldn't you, baby?"

"Ianto…" Jack sat next to him and rested his hand on his leg. Ianto tensed up against him and tried to pull away. "Ianto, we can't uproot him and take him on the run with us."

"We're not going on the run!" He tightened his hold on Tybalt and buried his fingers in his thick fur. "I can't leave him. If I leave him… it would mean that we're not coming back, and that everything we have now… Besides, I'd only worry, and wouldn't it be better to uproot him than to pass him off to someone he doesn't know…"

"I know." Jack pulled them both closer and started stroking Tybalt's tail. "We'll take him. He's family; how could I even suggest it?"

Ianto laughed and leaned against Jack, still feeling off-kilter. "I think he's getting stroppy."

"I think you're getting stroppy." Jack got up and fastened the last case up, then turned back and held his hand out to Ianto. "Dinner. In the morning we'll call Constant and tell him we're not coming back and then we'll go to a little place I know in the middle of nowhere to weather the winter. Sound good?"

"Sounds good." He put his hand in Jack's and let Jack pull him to his feet and out of the room. Behind them, Tybalt curled into a ball on top of one of the bags, and his tail twitched whilst he watched them leave.

X~X~X~X

The narrow, rough track between lichen-clad stone walls opened out into the corner of a farmyard. One side of the yard was flanked by stone-built outbuildings of varying sizes, one of which looked to have been converted to accommodation, as it had double glazing and empty hanging baskets over the door. Across from the outbuildings was a barn and, separated from it by a narrow passageway, a whitewashed farmhouse with a shed abutting it on the opposite side to the barn. Ianto got out of the car and closed the door, turning in the centre of the yard to look around it. "Okay, I wasn't expecting this."

Jack folded his arms on top of the car and grinned at him. "Do you like it?"

He gave Jack a look and wandered to the end of the yard to lean on the fence. Fields stretched away from the farm, sloping down behind the house towards a wooded stream and up behind the outbuildings to the brow of the hill. A red kite wheeled over the far hillside and Ianto's spirits soared with it. Behind him, Jack's feet crunched over the gravel, and Ianto turned to look at him. "It's beautiful," he said. "There must be no-one around for miles."

"It's pretty remote," Jack agreed. He settled against Ianto's side with his arms on the wall and Ianto's arm around his waist. "It was a working farm until last year, but my tenants retired and I've not found anyone wanting to take it on yet. No one wants to get into farming anymore; not out here, anyway."

Ianto looked around at the stunning scenery, bewildered. "Why?"

Jack laughed and leaned into him. "See how you feel when we've been here a while. For now, let's get the stuff into the house and I'll give you the tour." He pushed off the wall and reached for Ianto's hand. "The building in the middle is a holiday rental," Jack told him, gesturing to it with their joined hands. "They decided they didn't need it about five years ago so I let them convert it and rent it out for some extra income. It does pretty well." He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and let them into the farmhouse, then went back to the car with Ianto to get the bags and the cat basket. "Someone's still asleep."

"What a surprise." Ianto lifted the basket to look in it and was greeted with one sleepy eye peering at him. "We'll pour him onto the sofa when we get in, but we'd better keep him indoors for a while, anyway."

The entrance hall was stone-flagged with panelled walls and an imposing staircase up the left-hand side. It rose to a half-landing before turning ninety degrees and finishing the ascent over a door. Two other doors led off the hall, and Jack indicated them each in turn, starting with the one on their right. "Front sitting room, dining room, and the one in the corner is the back sitting room." He led the way into the back sitting room and indicated the two doors in there. "Kitchen's on the left with another door into the dining room and one into the shed – still haven't worked out what I'm going to do with that – and there's a study in there. Same layout upstairs, but the study and the front sitting room are bathrooms."

"Do we get an en-suite?"

"Of course. It's all-luxury here," Jack grinned. "Well, apart from the septic tank and the gas deliveries."

Ianto sighed and shrugged. "Can't have everything, I suppose. Do we need to go shopping or anything?"

"Nope. I have a management company, so I got someone to stock us up on everything we need and clean the house out." He grinned. "Wouldn't want to have to spring clean on the first day of our holiday. Speaking of which, we're not on the mains either – water comes straight from a spring up on the hillside."

"It's idyllic." He went to the window, which was next to a huge fireplace with what looked like a bread oven in one side of it, and leaned against the wall to look out. From here he could see a wide, wild meadow that stretched down the hill to a line of trees that marked the stream. "Is that hawthorn I can see?"

"Blackthorn," Jack corrected him. "I bought my sloe gin from the farm, and there's an orchard in a bend in the stream further up." He pressed himself against Ianto's back and wrapped his arms around him. "We could brew cider, keep a couple of sheep and chickens…"

"Now you're being an idiot," Ianto laughed. He turned and ran his hands down Jack's chest to rest on his stomach. "If we stay, we'll think about it in the spring, once we've found out whether we can live with the winter or not and we've sorted out things like getting one of those bedrooms converted into a nursery."

Jack beamed and leaned in to kiss him. "I never imagined you'd be all… domestic. You're kind of soft now."

"I never expected you'd be pregnant," he shot back with a grin. "And, you know, oncoming parenthood, coma, Torchwood not being fun anymore…" His grin slipped and he fixed Jack with a more serious, earnest look. "I'm just happy. I know where I want to be."

"Good." Jack slipped his hands down Ianto's back and grabbed his arse. "And I know exactly where I want you."

Ianto sighed. "At least one of us hasn't changed."


	3. Chapter 2

A couple of days turned into a week, and then a fortnight, and then they gave up pretending they were going to go back at any time soon. Rain lashed against the deep-set windows of the stone farmhouse and pooled in muddy puddles in the yard between the outbuildings, running off down the side of the house and through the meadow to the swollen stream. The wind howled through the narrow passage between the house and the barn opposite, and tugged at the branches of the trees, hurling leaves down into the swirling water.

Inside the house, in the cosier sitting room at the back of the house, a fire burned in the fireplace, casting dancing shadows around the room. Ianto had the wall lamp on above him to read the book he was having to rest on Jack's ankles because his feet were in Ianto's lap. "If you keep wiggling your toes," he warned, "I will tickle you."

Jack's toes stilled, and he glowered at Ianto over the top of his own book. "But they're cold."

"Then go and put some socks on!" He tugged the blanket over to cover Jack's feet anyway and shook his head. "Why do I put up with you?"

"You'd be lost without someone to fret over," Jack muttered. He yelped when Ianto reached under the blanket to pinch his ankle. "Fine, I'm going to get some socks."

Ianto tugged him back down again and covered his feet with the blanket. "I'll go," he offered. "The hall floor will be freezing by now. Keep my seat warm for me."

He turned the hall light on as he entered, curling his toes up against the cold that struck up from the stone flags even through his thick socks. The stairs were opposite the front door, and his route brought him close enough to hear a noise that didn't fit with the sounds of the raging storm. The two months they'd been there was long enough to get used to the fact that Google Maps and the Sat-Nav devices thought that their farm track was the main road over the hill, so he flicked the outside light on and was already unlocking the door when he heard the first knock. "I'm coming," he told them, despite the fact that the thick oak would deaden the sound. "Bloody drivers."

When he got it open, tugging it past the point where it stuck in weather this wet, he came face-to-face with a bedraggled looking woman who studied him with suspicion. She was a few years older than him, dark haired and thin, so wet that her clothes clung to her and she shivered. "I'm so sorry," he said, despite his irritation. "Have you been standing there long? You're soaked. We were in the back sitting room, so we didn't hear you. Come in, let's get you dry." He ushered her in and talked as fast as he was thinking. "You could do with some dry clothes, but our stuff would swamp you. Do you have any spare clothes with you?"

"I've got a case out in the car," she said, and the coldness to her tone stopped him. "Are you Ianto Jones?"

He sagged back against the side of the stairs, aware of his heart racing, and stared at her. "Not a Sat-Nav problem?"

"No. And you're very trusting for a man on the run." She looked beyond him to the sitting room doorway. "Jack."

"Alice." Jack hovered in the doorway, curling his toes into the carpet with his arms wrapped around himself. "Ianto, this is Alice Carter. My daughter."

She barely glanced at him, and her expression when she did was cold and resentful. He rested one hand on his hip and gestured with the other. "Right… Let's get you warm and dry first. Do you want to get your case out of the car whilst I run you a bath? I assume you'll be staying with us for a while…" When she nodded, still without looking at him, he dropped his hand from his waist and fled up the stairs.

He set the bath running first, and made up the bed in the room next to it. It was a large room, decorated in pastel yellows and greens and with a stunning view down the meadow to the stream when the weather was nice. By the time he was finished the bath was nearly run, so he turned it off, got a pair of socks for Jack and made his way back downstairs. Alice and Jack were both in the sitting room now, hovering at opposite ends of the room, so Ianto passed the socks to Jack and joined the hovering. "I've made up the back bedroom," he told Alice. "Bath is just about run, you can top it up with cold or more hot. I'll just… tea, coffee or hot chocolate?"

"What?" She blinked at him and shrugged. "Hot chocolate, please."

"And me," Jack requested. "Do you want any help?"

"Just put your socks on," he instructed. "I'll be a couple of minutes."

The awkward silence followed him into the kitchen and lingered like a blanket around him whilst he collected the milk from the pantry and heated it on the stove, and soon the cloying smell of warm milk was mixed with the sweeter, smoother smell of the chocolate as it swirled into it. He poured it out into three mugs, taking as long as he could over each action, and took the first one out into the sitting room. Jack had resumed his position on the sofa, staring into the fire with his arms folded, and Alice had taken the seat next to the fire. She was leaning forwards with her arms around her chest and her elbows on her knees, huddling closer to the fire, and looked startled when he touched her shoulder. "Here. Get yourself in the bath and get an early night. We'll talk in the morning, okay?"

She blinked up at him and Jack chuckled. "It's not just you ; he's been like that with everyone since…" He looked away from her suddenly sharp, suspicious glance at him and sighed. "He's right though."

Alice glanced between them again and uncurled herself from the chair. She went to the door and looked back. "Just up the stairs?"

"I'll show you," Ianto offered. He looked back at Jack and gestured to the kitchen. "Your drink's on the counter." In the hall, he picked up Alice's bag before she could and indicated for her to go up the stairs before him. "Double back over the stairs when you get to the top."

"Okay." She kept glancing back down at him, and once they were out of earshot of the living room she stopped and turned to face him. "You're Jack's…" She cleared her throat and folded her arms. "Do you know how dangerous he is?"

"Why do you think we're hiding out in the Brecon Beacons?" He moved around her and led her through to the bathroom. "The towel should be warm by now as well. Shall I leave your case here?"

"Yes, please." She reached out and took it off him, still hovering in the doorway. He was about to go when her hand darted out to stop him. "Mr Jones…"

"Ianto."

"Ianto, then. Thank you, for taking care of me. I know it must be awkward for you." She looked downstairs again. "Did you know about me?"

"I knew," he confirmed. "And, Alice… I'm so sorry for your loss."

The door closed, and he shut his eyes to swear silently. His socks slid on the polished wood of the staircase as he descended the stairs again, and when he got into the sitting room he found Jack standing by the window, looking out at the rain. "Not much of a view for brooding tonight," Jack said with false cheer. "I think the bottom of the meadow might flood."

"You can't possibly see that in this weather," Ianto scoffed, collecting his own mug and joining Jack at the window. He nudged Jack gently and sighed when Jack leaned back into him. "She'll be okay, Jack."

"Will she?" He shook his head and reached back with his free hand to grip Ianto's hip. "And how did she find us? It's just… It was all going so well."

He nodded and turned to rest his forehead against Jack's temple. The wind howled around the corner of the house, and where it had seemed like a defence before it now seemed like a threat, trapping them in.

X~X~X~X

Ianto stumbled downstairs and into the kitchen in search of coffee and food. Quiet voices drifted through from the dining room, and he pushed the door open to investigate. Jack and Alice were sitting opposite each other, tucking into a mountainous fry-up with glasses of orange juice. He ran a hand through his hair and blinked at them. "Morning. Coffee?"

He didn't need Jack's answer, but waited for Alice to give him a shy, awkward smile before he went back in to put the coffee machine on. Jack followed him through and embraced him from behind so that the swell of his abdomen pressed against Ianto's back. "I did breakfast for you," he told him. "It's in the warming cupboard. Thought you wouldn't be long getting up."

"Thanks." He craned his head back to demand a kiss, then dropped his voice to ask, "How is she?"

"Rattled." Jack muffled his words against Ianto's neck. "Something's spooked her, but she won't tell me what." He pulled away from Ianto and moved down the counter. "Do you want toast with your breakfast?"

Ianto finished the coffee and took the pot and a handful of mugs through to the dining room, and Jack followed with the fresh toast and Ianto's breakfast. They settled down, Jack in the seat he'd occupied before and Ianto in the one next to him, and Ianto offered the coffee pot to Alice. "Guests first." He smiled across at her. "It's strong, so you will want some milk in it unless you want to be bouncing off the ceiling all day."

"Thanks for the warning." She kept her eyes on what she was doing, and passed the coffee pot back without looking at him. "So…"

Ianto started on his sausages and tried to ignore the tension. Jack was nearly finished, and he gobbled down the last few mouthfuls and set his plate aside, on top of Alice's. That done, he leaned back in his seat, rocking it onto two legs, and rested one hand on his abdomen. "So…" he started, and Alice looked up at him at last. "You found us pretty easily?"

"No, actually." She hugged her mug and lifted her chin. "I had help. When I got to Cardiff and you weren't there, and no one at Torchwood knew where you'd gone either… I looked deeper."

"Where did you look?" he asked. Ianto looked up to watch them, a piece of bacon hovering between his mouth and the plate. "Who helped you?"

"Is this an interrogation?" She took a deep breath and shook her head. "You remember Bridget Spears? She was helping you when Ianto was in hospital."

"Yeah." He looked away and his shoulders tensed. "I'd known her a long time."

"Well, she was the one who helped me get out of the country, and then when I came back, she gave me what she'd found on Steven and helped me to find you." She looked up again when Jack pushed his chair back and left the room in a hurry, turning, with reluctance, to Ianto. "Where did he go?"

"Elsewhere." He set his cutlery down and leaned forwards on the table, towards her. "Alice, he was worried sick about you. We had no idea where you'd gone, and that coming so soon after they held us all and…" He trailed off and shook his head. "I know it may seem hard to believe, but he cares about you a lot."

She gave him a blank look. "Do you think that matters anymore? I'm here because I need help, and I have nowhere else to turn." When he couldn't respond she got up and collected her and Jack's empty plates to take to the kitchen. "You'd better finish your breakfast and make sure he's alright."

He watched her go and wolfed down the last of his breakfast. By the time he got into the kitchen she'd disappeared, leaving the plates on the counter. He stacked them next to the sink and went to look in the most obvious place for Jack to be.

Up another flight of stairs from the bedrooms were two empty storage rooms. They had low windows along the sides, under the eaves, and a wide fireplace against the outer wall. Jack had planned to convert them into bedrooms for his first B&B plans, but after he decided to keep it as a farm none of his tenants had needed more space than the four rooms provided. Even the outhouse conversion was mostly rented out to walkers. The bare wood floors were unpolished and splinters tugged at his socks as he crossed to where Jack was sitting with his back to the slope of the roof and turned on himself to look out at the grey weather. "She's back, Jack," he told him gently. "She's here and she's safe."

"She doesn't want to be here, though." Jack sighed and straightened up just enough for Ianto to settle in behind him and wrap an arm around him. "I don't know what this means. For us, for me and her… I hate not knowing. And what… what would make her come to me, after what I did?"

"You did nothing, Jack…" Ianto tried to assure him, but Jack was having none of it.

"That's exactly the problem! I was so wrapped up in my fears that I let them…" He choked and closed his eyes tightly. "He was ten, Ianto, and I let them kill him."

"Jack." Ianto tightened his arm and wrapped the other around him as well. "Do you regret being there with me?"

"No! No… not that. I regret not being with them, but never being with you." Jack turned awkwardly and kissed his cheek, all he could reach at that angle. "If I'd had to choose, though…"

Ianto closed his eyes and nodded. He smoothed his hand over Jack's abdomen and held him tighter. "Good."

"Good?"

"They're your family," he explained simply. "You belong with them."

"You're my family too!" Jack pulled out of his arms so that he could turn to face him and cradled his face in his palms. "They needed me to be there and protect them, but I couldn't leave you and not know whether you'd be alright; I wanted to be with you. And I... I can't forgive myself for that."

Ianto's breath caught, and he curled a hand around the back of Jack's neck to bring their lips together in a soft, tender kiss, noses resting side by side and brushing against cheeks. Jack's hands combed through his hair, brushed over his shoulders and down to his waist, pulled him even closer, tucked his fingers up under Ianto's T-shirt to press against warm skin. When he pulled away, Ianto rubbed his nose against Jack's, darting in for one more kiss before he sat back to look at him again. "You thought you were a greater danger to them if you were there than if you were with me. That's what you told me, isn't it?" Jack nodded, jerking towards Ianto more than the movement should have entailed, and Ianto pulled him into the embrace, until Jack's face tucked against his neck and his hands clutched at Ianto's back. "You did everything you could, and now she's come to you. You have to be there for her this time."

"I am." He sat back again and wiped his face dry with the back of one hand, studying the grain of the floorboards. "I should go and make sure she's alright, see if she's ready to talk."

They made their way back downstairs through the silent house, looking into every room they passed in case Alice was in one of them. They found her in the front sitting room, a cheerful room decorated in blue and white with a Welsh dresser full of Blue Jasper Wedgewood, curled in one of the armchairs with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She looked up when they entered and gave them a watery-eyed, wary smile. "You found him, then?"

"I always find him," Ianto told her. Jack went and sat on the sofa, on the end nearest to Alice, but Ianto hovered in the doorway, unsure about whether he'd be welcome in this conversation. "I'll just..."

"You can stay," she said, her gaze fixed on Jack as she spoke. "I guess you're my stepfather, anyway. Part of the family."

His instincts still told him to leave, but another glance at Jack told him to stay. Jack's jaw and eyes were tight, and his hands were clenched together between his knees, one finger plucking at the seam of his jeans. When Ianto sat next to him and reached across for his hand he stilled, unclenching and uncurling his fingers to lace through Ianto's. "I wish you'd let me bring him over sooner," he told her quietly. "I feel like we wasted so much time."

"Jack... stop." She closed her eyes and turned her face away. "It's too late for that. It was already too late for that."

Jack tightened his hand and dropped his gaze. "I never wanted to lose you." He stared into the empty hearth and blinked fast. "I just... I woke up one morning and you were gone."

"Mum told me she was scared of you."

"She found out that I can't die." It was Ianto's turn to tighten his grip, and Jack squeezed back and looked up at him. "I got so used to it being the end of my relationships... I never thought to hope it could be any different."

Alice cleared her throat, shifting in her seat. She looked down at their hands, studied Jack's expression, flicked a glance at Ianto, then another, dropped her gaze to their hands again and then to her own hands in her lap. "I'm glad you have each other," she said, with troubled honesty. "No one should be alone."

"You're not alone either," Ianto promised her. "I'm still not sure how, but you found us."

"I was desperate." She fixed her gaze on Jack and lifted her chin. "I'm pregnant ."

They stared at her. "You're... pregnant?" Jack covered his own abdomen and shook his head. "Who?"

"I was an idiot," she snapped at him. "I went to find Steven's dad. He needed to know, and I didn't want to tell him over the phone or by letter, so I went to visit him. I thought he was being nice, for once in his miserable existence, but he... I got out of there as soon as I could, but it turned out he was lying about the vasectomy."

"Oh Alice..." Jack twitched towards her, unsure of his welcome.

"I wish I'd taken you up on the offer to castrate him," she spat. She folded her arms and tucked her chin into her chest. "I never should have gone near him."

Jack got up and knelt next to her, resting a hand on her knee. "Alice..."

"Dad." She grabbed at his hand and held on tight. "I don't know what to do. I can't have another baby, but then I went to get a termination and... I'd be as bad as them."

"I understand..." he started.

"You can't possibly." She pulled her hand back and hugged her chest again. "I lost my son, and now I'm pregnant and I don't know... I don't know whether I can love another."

"Alice... Alice, listen to me." He waited until she'd dragged her gaze back to him before he reached for her hand again. "It broke my heart when your mum took you away from me. I promised that I'd never have a child again, because it opened me up to so much hurt, because I loved your mum and I trusted her, and she took away everything that mattered to me. But it never stopped me loving you, never stopped me loving Steven. The first time I held him..." He closed his eyes and swallowed. "I lost him too, Alice. And now I'm pregnant. And I'm so scared."

She shrank back and stared. "You're... you can't be pregnant."

"And yet I am." He shifted around until he sat on the floor and splayed his hand on the swell of his abdomen, drawing her attention to it. "Did you think I just got fat?" He waited for a response, but she was still staring at him like he'd gone mad, so he hurried to explain. "It's another thing that's different about me." He looked up at her, desperate for her to understand. "I was born with a dual reproductive system, but it wasn't functional: I was infertile. When I was preparing to go to college I took part in a clinical trial, mostly for the money, to see if they could... turn it back on, I guess. It worked, and I had two children: one that I carried for another trial patient, and one that another patient carried for me."

Ianto slid up the sofa and rested his hand on Jack's shoulder. "What happened to them?"

"They were adopted." He sighed and leant back against Ianto's legs. "I'd got a place at a really prestigious college - if I'd thrown that away, I wouldn't have been able to look after them anyway. And if I had, I wouldn't be here now."

Alice had sunk back into the seat, still staring at them. "You're... You're impossible." She stood up suddenly, nearly knocking Jack over. "I need a drink, fresh air, space, something... I'll be back."

When she left, Jack curled forwards to rest his forehead against his knees. His shoulders shook, and Ianto slid from the sofa to rest his hand on his bowed back. "Jack? I'm here."

"I know." He lifted his head and smiled back at Ianto through his tears. "I'm a terrible father," he confessed. "I always have been. I fool myself that this time it's going to be different, and it never is."

"You were a good dad to Alice." Ianto reached out and pulled Jack back against him to hold him close. "You've been there for her as much as you could, protected her, cared for her and loved her. And when she needed help, she came to you. Losing her wasn't your fault."

"I still feel like I could have done more."

He stroked Jack's cheek. "What could you have done?" Jack shrugged, and Ianto caught his cheek to stop him hiding away . "You're a good man, Jack, and a good dad. Just be here for her, and wait for her. She needs you."

"She has me." He turned to look at Ianto with a soft smile. "And so do you."

X~X~X~X

They came downstairs one morning to find Alice on the sofa, staring at the phone she was turning over and over in her hands. There was no signal up here – no landline or internet either, there was rarely any post for them, and Ianto went into Hereford to do the shopping once a week, on his own now that Jack had started looking pregnant. It was an isolated, idyllic experience for them, but Alice was struggling with being cut off from the rest of the world.

She smiled up at them and tried to hide the phone. "Hi. I couldn't sleep," she explained, "I meant to make a start on breakfast."

Jack sighed. "You won't get a signal, Alice." He sat next to her and rested his hand on her arm. "Look, why don't you go into town with Ianto this afternoon and call her? Let her know where you are so she can contact you if she finds anything."

Ianto headed through to the kitchen to give them some space, but he could still hear the conversation clearly, even over the hum of the coffee machine.

"How, how could they do that? After everything they did, how could they deny us closure like that?"

"I'm sorry." Jack said softly. "We'll find him. They can't stand in our way forever."

The sofa creaked, and Ianto pictured them shifting together, Alice settling in to let Jack hug her. He couldn't help imagining the two of them together in another three months when Jack would be enormous, or even a year with two babies side by side. Maybe by then they'd have been able to lay Steven to rest at last.

The next thing he heard from them was the sofa again, and then Jack padded through into the kitchen and hugged him sideways. "She's going to go with you and try calling. You could go and buy decorations together."

He was trying to keep focussed, but Ianto could tell he didn't want to be left behind. "I'm sorry," he told him. "It's a bit too obvious now. I'll bring you something back."

"I know." Jack tightened his grip on his waist and sighed. "I'll curl up in front of the fire with a book and torment the cat a bit."

"Be nice." He turned and caught Jack for a kiss, then called out to the living room. "Alice, we should set off soon if we're going to get there and back in time for dinner."

"Yeah." She came to lean in the doorway and smiled at him weakly. "I'm coming."

Ianto was dressed and ready to leave quarter of an hour later, and he collected the shopping list that Jack had compiled from him. He rested his hands on the other man's waist and kissed him, rubbing his thumbs over the curve of his belly. "Behave whilst I'm out," he teased. "And as we're leaving you on your own, is there anything you particularly want me to get?"

"Bring me cake." Jack brought their lips together again to sweeten the order. "And can you pick up some more books in Hay? I don't mind what, but I've read everything here."

"You and me both." He extricated himself from Jack's hands and added that to the list. Jack's smiled turned wistful, so Ianto cupped his cheek and looked him in the eye. "I'll be back before you know it, okay? I'm only going to Hereford."

"I know." He sighed and pulled away from Ianto to collect the plates. "We're not low on most of the stuff on the list, but we might as well stock up whilst you have the chance. You could get the stuff for Christmas as well, but I'll leave that up to you."

"Okay. It's market day, so I'll see what they've got." Alice's footsteps started descending the stairs, so he cupped the back of Jack's neck for one more kiss before he went out to join her.

Ianto drove, taking the Audi rather than Alice's small Micra because of the amount of shopping they were doing. The quickest route took him on the main road through Abergavenny, but it felt longer because of the doubling back required and he wanted to avoid the cameras on it, so he took them on the more direct route. It was a scenic drive through the national park, still dappled with frost that clung to the hedges and painted the fields white in the shade. Alice rested her cheek against the window and sighed, fogging the glass. "I bet this will be beautiful when it snows."

"I'm sure it will," he agreed. "Impassable, though."

"What?"

"We'll get snowed in." He had to pull in to let a car go past in the other direction, and he examined its occupants without conscious thought. "Even in the snow we usually get the farm gets cut off. Jack was saying that he's never known a winter when his tenants haven't had to sit it out. He normally sends them a Christmas hamper to apologise."

"That sounds like dad," she laughed. "Claiming responsibility for the weather. I never asked why he has a working farm, of all things."

"He inherited it, I think." He looked over at her and smiled. "He's inherited quite a lot over the years. And he buys property as well, but I'm pretty sure the farm was an inheritance. You're right; it's not the sort of thing he'd buy normally."

"Property seems to be his big hobby," Alice commented. "I rented a house from him. It was too big for us, but I liked it, and he only let me pay because I insisted. If I ever got into difficulty it was good to know I wasn't going to lose the house."

"He's a good man. We're both lucky to have him."

"Yeah."

The conversation trailed off, and Ianto turned the radio once they got within range of civilisation and radio signal. The drive was over an hour, but the twisting roads within the national park made it seem much shorter. It was nearly lunchtime when they pulled into the multi-storey car-park in the city centre, and they got caught in the lunch hour crowd rushing from work to food and back again.

Ianto caught Alice's arm when another person too busy to look bumped into her, and pulled her into a little independent tea room off one of the side streets, where a waitress greeted them and seated them at a table at the back. "It's too busy out there," he explained. "Let's get something to drink and go back out when it's safe."

She smiled back at him and picked up the menu. "I might have to get something to eat as well. We only just ate, but I'm hungry again."

"It's the smell of fresh scones," he imparted. "They're clearly designed to make us want them."

She groaned and searched through the menu. "Okay, I'm going for the cream tea. What about you?"

He nodded and attracted the attention of the waitress as she returned to the kitchens. "Two cream teas, please. One with coffee, one with decaff?" he checked with Alice, who nodded. Once the waitress had taken their orders and left again he relaxed into his seat. "I'm really glad I'm not the pregnant one."

"You wouldn't live without your caffeine," she laughed. "It'd be like first thing in the morning _all the time_. It'd be horrible."

"You'd have to lock me in a cupboard and feed me through the door," he agreed. "Speaking of which, I'm going to go and find the toilet."

Alice went when he came back, leaving him to guard the bags and their seats, and by the time she returned their orders had arrived and he was halfway through putting together a shopping list. She picked up her scone and started spreading it with butter, leaning over to look at what he was writing. "Do you jam first or cream first?"

"Jam first." He glanced up at her and watched her spreading cream on top of the butter. "It's the only way to do it."

She huffed and shook her head. "Cream first, nice and thick, and then runny jam poured on top."

"Thick, sticky jam with cream blobbed on top," he disagreed, setting his shopping list aside to demonstrate. "Just like that." She chuckled and he reached out to take her hand. "Are you alright?"

"No." She looked up at him with wide, hurt eyes. "What do I do, Ianto?"

He squeezed her hand and nodded at her bag. It was quiet in the café, and he wasn't worried that they'd be overheard. "Call her. Whilst you have tea in front of you."

Alice laughed and pulled the phone out of her bag with trembling hands. The number was the only one programmed into the phone's memory, and she closed her eyes once she'd dialled it, pressing one hand to her chest whilst the other held her phone to her ear. "Hello, Bridget? Have you found anything?" She pressed her napkin to her lips and listened quietly, nodding her understanding occasionally. Her eyes filled with tears, and she thrust the phone at Ianto. "I need to go and powder my nose. Deal with her, will you?"

He accepted the phone from her. "Hello?"

_"Mr Jones?"_

"Speaking." He watched Alice wend her way through to the bathroom and kept his eye on the closed door. "What's the news?"

_"Some very powerful people are aware that you're still looking for Steven. For the sake of your child, I suggest that you leave well alone until your captain can protect them better."_

He gripped the phone tightly. "Is that what you told Alice?"

_"You will get no closure if you get yourself killed. You have survived very well so far – don't spoil that."_ There was the click of a computer key, and Ianto heard her sigh. _"I'll be in touch if I find anything. Don't call me again."_

The silence on the phone was ominous, and left Ianto feeling unsettled and isolated in the crowd.

X~X~X~X

Ianto pushed open the curtains and smiled at the white world beyond. It had been like this for days, reflecting a chilly half-light into the house, but today he felt he could really appreciate it. "A white Christmas," he breathed.

Behind him, Jack propped himself up in bed and pulled the duvet back up over his bump. His T shirt was rucked up over it, and he pulled it off and dropped it on the floor rather than straighten it. "Merry Christmas. Going to come over here and seal it?"

He left the curtains open and crawled up the bed, propping himself up on one elbow next to Jack to kiss him. Jack was still sleepy, warm and contented, and it was worth the morning breath to get him like this. Almost. He pulled away with one last kiss to the tip of Jack's nose. "Brushing my teeth," he explained. "Stay there; I'll bring you a mint."

Even the sound of Jack's laugh seemed softened by the snow blanketing the house. He was brushing his teeth when Jack appeared in the doorway behind him, with his T shirt back on. Ianto frowned at him and finished brushing his teeth, then stepped aside to let Jack get at the sink. "Sorry," Jack said, in a voice that completely lacked remorse. His next sentence was smothered in his toothbrush, so Ianto waved it away and went to get back into bed.

Jack paused in the bedroom doorway when he got back, and his amused gaze took in the pile of clothes at the side of the bed that Ianto had dropped there to make a point. "Something you're after?" he asked, locking the bedroom door behind him.

"You." Ianto lifted the duvet and turned his most beseeching expression on Jack. "It's cold, Jack."

"I'd better warm you up, then." He shucked his own clothes and slid under the quilt with Ianto, stroking his hand up Ianto's side and over his back to pull him closer. "You are cold."

"Well, the weather outside is frightful," he pointed out, deadpan. "But the fire is so delightful."

Jack shut him up, tugging him even closer and devoting himself to exploring Ianto's mouth with an easy, languid single-mindedness. They sank into the pillows and against each other, wrapped in their warm cocoon, tucked safely away from the cold world outside.

They emerged downstairs over an hour later, looking as sated and rumpled as they felt judging by Alice's expression. She was curled in her usual armchair, closer to the fire than it had been since they'd shifted it out of the corner to make room for the Christmas tree that now stood there. The decorations were simple, but they had all felt that they had something to celebrate, even with the void still gaping in the family.

"Merry Christmas." He greeted her with a kiss on the cheek from behind and squeezed her shoulders. "I hope we didn't wake you."

"You're as bad as he is, Ianto. Merry Christmas to you too, and you, Dad." She smiled up at Jack as he too bent to kiss her cheek. "White Christmas."

"It is. We won't get out of here for a week." Jack went to the window and looked out. "Wow. Have you seen how high it's got?"

Ianto heard him from the kitchen and tugged aside the curtain over the window by the sink. His jaw dropped when he saw the snow piled halfway up the window. "Bloody hell. We're well and truly stuck."

"It's a good job we've got Dad catering for a dozen," Alice called back. "Otherwise we'd have to eat you."

"Why me?"

"We're pregnant!" They chorused, and he heard them laugh in unison.

"You're hopeless." He finished making the mulled apple juice in a frosted-glass jug and took it through on a tray with three mugs. "A proper Christmas drink," he announced. "And I forgot the gingerbread. Jack, it's in the cupboard above the fridge."

"Got it." Jack returned a moment later with a tin of home-baked gingerbread that he passed around whilst Ianto poured the mugs of mulled apple. "I used to dream of Christmases like this," he confessed when they were sat down again and he was tucked under Ianto's arm. "I spent so many alone… you really realise how much it means when you don't have anyone to share it with."

"I'm sorry, Dad." Alice reached out to him and squeezed his leg. "Mum was so wrong, about everything."

"She did one thing right," he assured her. "I wouldn't have you without her."

"That's not entirely true, is it?" She sighed and curled her hands around her mug. "I wish Steven was here for this." The silence descended again, painful but not uncomfortable, and she was the one to break it with a huff. "Ianto, you're going to have to be the one to go under the tree, because Dad doesn't bend anymore and I… can't be bothered."

He laughed and set his drink aside, untwining himself from around Jack and slipping to the floor to start collecting the gaily wrapped parcels from under the tree. "Alright… Alice, this one's for you." He sat with his back against the fireplace, enjoying the heat on his back, to watch his family opening their presents until only a small pile was left, all of them addressed to Steven and kept for his return .

X~X~X~X

The snow receded after the New Year, just enough for Ianto to do a very, very careful trip into the nearest town to get fresh vegetables and milk. He stopped in a café in town that supplied free wifi to customers to do some new enquiries whilst he ate lunch. His questions were finally starting to get answers, and there, for the first time, one of his enquiries led back where he'd always expected them to – to Harold Saxon. So much had gone wrong during his short days in power, and they were still picking up the pieces that the Doctor hadn't bothered to.

When he'd read enough to get himself riled up he slammed the computer shut and shoved it back in his bag, turning his attention back to his lunch. Sleet was falling on the sleepy town, and as the afternoon wore on there was every chance it would turn back to snow. The last thing he wanted was to be snowed in the town, unable to get home until it thawed again. The urgency sent him to the Co-Op instead of the greengrocer's, cutting out the need for the walk down to the other end of the high street and back. The papers just inside the door caught his attention, and he lifted one to read the headline. _"Torchwood Cardiff Reopens For Business"_ the headline announced, and the subheading informed him that the previous manager and his partner were still missing. He put it back and shook his head, collecting a selection of fresh fruit and veg and a few large bottles of milk into his basket along with a few luxuries.

The girl at the counter scanned them through in between a conversation with the boy on the till behind her, and eventually gave Ianto her attention when she had to give him the total. "You got caught out by the snow, then?" she asked. "Bad winter this year."

"Yeah. Pretty, but not exactly convenient." He handed over two twenty pound notes and nodded over towards the door. "I see Torchwood's getting on with it regardless."

"I wouldn't know." She counted out his change and passed it over. "It don't bother me. Something about aliens, an' I dunno. It's Cardiff, innit?"

"It's always Cardiff." He bagged up the last of his shopping, collected his change and pulled his gloves back on. The weather was worse already, and he hurried back to the car with his face tucked into his scarf.

By the time he got back to the farm he was rattled by a couple of near misses he'd had with the stone walls that lined the roads, and as he dragged himself and his shopping to the front door he was glad he didn't have to do it again for a while. "The weather's turned again," he called out. "I think we're stuck for a couple of days."

There was no immediate answer, but he heard raised voices upstairs and hurried to find them. They were in Alice's bedroom, where she was stuffing her things into a bag and Jack was trying to stop her. "Alice, listen!" Jack was protesting.

"I'm not going to sit around and wait," she spat at him. "They have my son. Steven, Jack! How can you stand there and do nothing?"

"What's going on?" Ianto caught Jack's arm and rubbed his thumb in a soothing circle. "Alice, you won't get out whatever you try, we're snowed in again."

She glared daggers at him, and he realised, unsurprised, that she was on the verge of tears. Jack reached back and wrapped his arm around Ianto's waist. "Constant has been in touch. He says that Steven is alive, and that he'll return him to Alice if I give myself in."

Ianto stared at him. "How? We don't even have a phone."

"Pick the important things, why don't you?" Alice snapped. "He won't do it."

"I wasn't born yesterday," Jack told her with forced calm. "Do you honestly believe that they'd keep their word? They blew me up!"

"You should try," she spat at him. "He's my son."

"And you're my daughter…"

"I am not. Your daughter," she snapped. "You were never my father, and you certainly aren't now."

Jack's expression turned cold, and he splayed his hand across the swell of his belly protectively. "Well done, you have me completely convinced."

"What the fuck is going on?" Ianto asked quietly, cutting across their argument. "Facts, not invective, please."

"Our searches haven't gone unnoticed; Constant has 'discovered' the cover-up." Jack mimed the inverted commas with the one hand that wasn't clinging to Ianto. "And he says that as there's a warrant out for my arrest, he'll reunite Steven and Alice and not charge either of you with aiding and abetting a known criminal if I hand myself over quietly."

"Since when was there a warrant out for your arrest?" He turned to Alice and shook his head. "Constant's the worst kind of snake. He won't keep his word, if he's telling the truth to begin with."

She shook her head. "We have to do something."

"And we will." He turned to Jack and held him. "You have to get out of here. We'll call the Doctor and you can leave until it's safe. I'll stay behind. Not here, but somewhere. I'll find Steven and stop whatever is happening to us. And then I'll call you, and you can come home, and we'll retire again. Properly, this time."

"Ianto…"

"Jack, it's the only way." He rested their foreheads together, aware of Alice returning to packing her bags. "We can't just up and leave everything behind forever. We can't keep running from this. Someone has to stop them, and it has to be me."

Jack tightened his grip on Ianto. "Come with me. We'll come back when we're ready. I need you."

"I'm sorry." He released him and looked over at Alice. "You'll be safe with the Doctor until I've fixed this."

She nodded, and Ianto pulled Jack through to their room and collected a suitcase for Jack and a rucksack for him from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Whilst Jack watched, he started to pack everything they didn't want to leave behind into the suitcase, and everything he would need into the bag. "Call him," he instructed gently. "Go and get your phone, it's in the study downstairs."

By the time Jack returned, clutching the phone in his hand like he wanted to crush it, Ianto was already starting on selecting items from the stash of tech they'd brought with them. "He's coming," Jack told him. "I'm impressed on him the need for accuracy."

"Good." Ianto wrapped two of the tablets in a jumper and stashed them in an inside pocket of his rucksack. He tucked some of the phones into several outside pockets with the magnetic lockpick device, then put the camera, GPS devices and a handful of memory sticks into a soft satchel, rolled it and tucked it down the side of the surveillance kit he'd stashed in the main body of his rucksack. "I'll start in London," he said, scribbling a note on the pad on the bedside table. "The main squats will have moved, but I'll find somewhere to keep my head down. Track down Green, find out what he knows. I don't want to get too close to Constant whilst he's still in office."

"Ianto ..."

"Can you pass me the sleeping bag, please?" He stuffed another jumper, a pair of jeans and a few changes of underwear around the kit, tucking his own gun and a spare into a sock each. "Change my hair - I can bleach it easily enough and take five years off. Grab some make-up in a pound shop, shoe polish in various interesting colours." He unrolled the sleeping bag, packed it full of wads of cash and stuffed it back in its sack, which he just managed to squeeze into the rucksack and still fasten it. "I'll find him."

"Ianto!" Jack caught his hands and held them still. "Promise me you'll be alright?"

"I'll be fine," he promised, forcing a smile for Jack's benefit. "Just like old times."

"I can't lose you too." Jack squeezed his hands and held them to his own chest. "If anything happens to you, I'll never know. You... you have to come back to me."

"I will." He pulled his hands out of Jack's and embraced him, pressing his lips to Jack's neck. "I promise, I'll find him and I'll bring him home. You and Alice can stay with the Doctor, and you'll barely know I'm gone. I'll call you as soon as it's safe."

A familiar wheezing, grinding roar echoed up the stairwell, and he pulled away from Jack to pick the bag up again. "Time to go."

They stopped in Alice's room to check that she was ready, and Jack carried her bag and his own down to the TARDIS. The Doctor, a new one with floppy hair and a bow tie, was watching the grandfather clock when they arrived. "It's stopped," he told them, without looking around. "Why is it stopped?"

"The ticking was getting on my nerves." Alice eyed him and the closed door. "How did you get in?"

"TARDIS. My ship is a time machine, goes wherever she wants." He turned and smiled at her. "And brings me along for the ride."

"Thanks for coming to the rescue, Doctor." Jack dropped the bags and hugged him. "We can't be here."

"You're pregnant!" He held Jack at arms' length and looked him up and down. "You're... how?"

Ianto rolled his eyes. He grabbed Jack's arm to drag him away before the Doctor could get distracted, collecting Tybalt from the sitting room and pressing him into the Doctor's arms. "Doctor, we have to go. We can explain everything in the TARDIS."

" Cat, hello! Right, yes. In we go." He ushered them in like an over enthusiastic puppy, and, once he'd set Tybalt down to explore, danced around them to the gleaming console with its buttons, levers and typewrite keyboard. "Any comments?"

"You redecorated." Jack turned on the spot, stopping when he came to face the column rising from the centre of the console. "And that's a bit..."

"It's bigger on the inside," Alice interrupted him. "How is it bigger on the inside?"

"Quantum physics." The Doctor flicked a switch and beamed at her. "This ship is a living, sentient being, capable of travelling time and space and even breaking through the dimensions into parallel universes. Bad idea though," he added in conspiratorial tones, "causes all sorts of environmental problems, and the occasional relationship break-up. Or... two. Anyway! We'll get you to your rooms, introduce you to the other passengers. They'd just gone to bed when you called, so I thought I'd pick you up whilst they slept. You, Jack... you will like Amy."

"Doctor, I need you to take me to London." Ianto hadn't moved from his position by the door, and hadn't set down his bag. Halfway between him and the console Jack froze, shoulders stiffening. "Jack will explain it all, but I need to get there now."

The Doctor looked at him, studying him more closely than Ianto was comfortable with. "Alright then, Ianto. Jack had better have a good explanation for this." He flicked switches and span a dial. "Grab hold of something. Probably best if you two sit down, actually," he told Jack and Alice. "We don't want you to fall, do we?"

The TARDIS lurched and swayed across time and space, landing with a thump that threw Ianto to the ground. Jack and Alice were clinging to the seats, glaring at the Doctor and, in Alice's case, looking decidedly queasy. "I'm going to hide in the bedrooms in future," Jack muttered. "I remember it being much more fun."

"Your centre of gravity's not what you're used to," the Doctor explained, gazing at the screens and occasionally tapping them. "All that liquid sloshing about inside."

"I think I'm going to be sick," Alice said.

Ianto hovered by the door. His palms were damp and his hands trembled, but he met Jack's anxious gaze with his head held high. "Look after them for me, Doctor."

"I will. And you look after yourself."

He looked over at Jack once more and saluted him. "Sir. Jack..."

Jack got up and came to him, resting his hands on his hips because he couldn't hug him with the bag on. "You come home to me, you hear?"

"Yeah." He choked once, and caught Jack's lips in one last, slow kiss. "Keep my baby safe." He stroked his hands down Jack's arms and looked past him to the Doctor. "Where are we?"

"You're in Kings Cross, near the station. Where you go from here is up to you."

Jack squeezed his hands once more and smiled. "Got your Oyster Card ?"

"Getting a new one," he explained. "Unregistered, bought with cash. Untraceable."

"Good thinking." Jack stroked his cheek and smiled. "You are amazing."

"I know." He pulled out of Jack's hold and smiled at Alice. "Look after him for me, Alice. Look after each other." Without another glance, he pulled open the TARDIS door and stepped out into the busy London streets, setting a brisk pace towards the station.


	4. Chapter 3

Ianto knocked on the door of a boarded-up warehouse just outside the regenerated docklands area and stuffed his hands back into his pockets to keep them warm. It had taken him a couple of days to find his way into the squatting network, and they'd eventually pointed him to a newly-squatted space that would welcome anyone who could use a screwdriver. Slush from the street clung to his boots and soaked into the legs of his jeans, whilst tiny flakes of fresh snow settled in his hair. When the door finally opened he was studied by a young person, possibly a man, possibly not human at all, with blown pupils and greasy hair that hung over his shoulders. Ianto raised an eyebrow at him. "Is this The Cake Factory?"

The person blinked at him and scowled. "Are y'a pig?" they asked, in a slurred voice that Ianto was almost certain was that of a human male.

He raised his eyebrow even further and looked over his own shoulder at his backpack, then back at the person. "Do I look like a pig?"

"I dunno. It takes all sorts. Come in pig." He opened the door wider and let him into the cavernous warehouse space, calling out, "Piggy come to call."

Heads snapped up, all of them human and in varying stages of cleanliness and awareness, and Ianto shrugged at them helplessly . "Don't ask me," he told them. "Angie sent me over here, said you had space and a use for a screwdriver."

The crowd relaxed at that, and several of them for to their feet to welcome him. "Ignore Tosser," a gangly young man told him. He extended a hand that was as long and thin as the rest of him to Ianto. "I'm Scully; nice to meet you."

"No, really?" He shook Scully's hand and grinned. "My boyfriend used to be Mulder ."

"Yeah? Well I guess you're Mulder this time." He clapped him on the shoulder and tugged him over to the circle. "Guys, this is Mulder. Chef'll be back in a bit, he says," he added to Ianto. They sat on the floor and Ianto declined the bong he was offered. "So what brings you to us, apart from your screwdriver?"

"Nowhere better than London, is there?" He looked around and they nodded. "Shit goes down here."

"Shit's going down everywhere, my friend," a girl across from him told him. She gestured expansively with the bong and leaned back on one hand. "One day, the downtrodden of this country are going to rise up and crush the corporate scum. And we'll be there. Wherever it is, we'll be there."

"Torchwood are the worst," another girl opined. "Tramping over us and denying they exist for years. What are they for?"

There was a general mutter of agreement, and Ianto shifted uncomfortably. He declined the bong yet again and looked up at the ceiling. "This is a Torchwood place, isn't it?"

"Yeah, and they're not shifting us," the same girl muttered, without conviction. "We're taking it back for the masses who've put up with their shit for too long. We're gonna expose them… once we get the information off the computer, that is."

"They left a computer here?"

"Sure." She gestured with the bong to an office off the main hall. "We use the guest account to update the Facebook group. Taking it back."

He nodded. "I'll see if I can do anything with it, but first… do you have a toilet here, or do we use the pub?"

X~X~X~X

The Cake Factory, named for reasons long forgotten, was home to a chaotic mix of university drop-outs, drug addicts and anarcho-communists. It didn't have a hierarchy or a leader, but it did have someone who knew what was going on at least some of the time, and that was Chef. He claimed that he'd been conceived the night before 144 Piccadilly fell and raised in Frestonia, that he'd danced at Live Aid and spent the years before it going from picket line to picket line to join the battles. Ianto wasn't sure that the figures quite added up, but Chef told a good story and he was able to keep track of what day of the week it was so that they went scavenging in the right places. The Cake lived on what was thrown away by shops and 'liberated' on late night journeys in the dark, and Ianto quickly became an essential tool for their trips, for his talent with a lock pick and his complete lack of restraint when it came to breaking the law and getting his hands dirty.

He walked alongside Chef one night when they were returning to the factory, laden down with a depressing amount of perfectly good food that the supermarkets couldn't sell. Despite his contentment with the life, he'd so far found nothing to point him towards Steven, and he was running out of time before he was found again. The handles of the bags he carried cut into his fingers, and he shifted them into one hand so he could flex the other. "How much further is it?" he asked Chef. "I can't even work out where we are."

"Just leaving Rotherhythe. Ten minutes off."

"My fingers are going to hate me," he chuckled. "They're not used to carrier bags."

"Hands that hold guns aren't often good at the day-to-day," Chef commented.

Ianto shot him a look as they passed under a streetlight. "What makes you think I hold a gun?"

"The way you react when Bottle mentions Torchwood. You don't agree with her." Ianto heard the bags shift as if he were shrugging. "It wasn't hard. You're not here to squat – you're here to hide."

"Yep." He put his bags down against a fence and Chef stopped with him. "Does anyone else know?"

"I haven't mentioned it to them." There was the click of a lighter and then Ianto was left blinking away the after-images of the flame whilst the tip of Chef's cigarette glowed in the darkness. "What are you looking for?"

He closed his eyes and leaned against the fence. "A child. My nephew, of sorts. I'm not married to his uncle, and he's not his uncle, but he's nearly my nephew." The cigarette glowed brighter for a moment and bobbed. Ianto found himself wishing that a car would go past or that someone would turn a light on across the street, just to give him a bit of light. "Do you know what they did to defeat the aliens that came in July?"

"No, I don't." Chef offered him the cigarette, and their hands brushed together when he took it. "What did they do?"

"They took a child from his mother, ran a signal through his brain and broadcast it to them." He took a deep drag on the cigarette and passed it back. "Or so they told his grieving family."

"And you don't believe it?"

"I've heard rumours." He looked at the patch of darker night and the bobbing glow. "And now I need to know the truth."

The air filled with another cloud of pungent smoke, and then there was a rustle of bags. Ianto looked down to the white bags at his own feet and crouched cautiously to pick them up. When he wasn't captured or murdered for letting his guard down and Chef set off in the direction of The Cake, he followed behind with heavy steps. The next street was lit, and the group were huddled at the edge of the shadows, waiting for them. Chef nodded a greeting and glanced at Ianto. "We just had to shift some stuff around. Bag splittage was occurring."

"Fucking capitalism," Bottle muttered. There was a rumble of agreement and then they trudged on towards home.

X~X~X~X

"You're leaving." Chef dropped onto the chair that Ianto's socks had just vacated and watched him tightening the straps on his rucksack. "You don't have to."

"Yes I do." He buckled the top flap down and tightened that as well, then sat on the floor next to it. "I can't trust you." Chef looked about to protest, but Ianto cut him off, "No, I can't. Would you, in my position?"

Chef gave him a wry smile. "Where will you go?"

"Not decided yet. Somewhere…" He sighed and lifted the bag. "God, that's heavy. Anyway."

"Mulder." Chef held out his hand. "It was good having you, whatever your reasons."

"It was good being here." They walked to the door and Chef let him out. He hovered on the doorstep, facing the rain, and turned back with a smile. "And now, if anyone asks, you can say that Ianto Jones was here, and he went, and you don't know where he's gone. You can tell them what I want, and that I'm looking for my answers. And if the person asking after me is calling himself Captain Jack Harkness… tell him I love him."

"I'm not entirely comfortable with passing that sort of message on; it's a bit personal and morbid." Chef pulled a face. "I'll do my best, though. Was it Birmingham you said you were heading for?"

"It might have been." He saluted and turned away again. "Look after them, Chef. Let them eat cake."

He walked through the night and into the morning, eventually stopping at a train station to read the Metro. It was the usual drivel, but it gave him an excuse to keep his head down whilst he ate a bag of fresh doughnuts. The station filled and emptied around him repeatedly, and he ignored all of them. An article on the fifth page caught his eye, and he lifted it to read it more carefully.

_"Former Prime Minister Brian Green lost yesterday's by-election for the seat of Henley. The disgraced former politician didn't even win over enough voters to get back his deposit, getting only 91 votes - 0.3% of votes cast. Neighbours in the rural village of Towersey say that he won't have any support in the village…"_

"Towersey…" he muttered. "Why is it always places I've never heard of?" He shoved the last doughnut in his mouth and tucked his paper under his arm, swinging onto the train a moment before the doors closed.

X~X~X~X

Ianto was good at waiting. Torchwood had always involved long hours of waiting for the next sighting or the next victim, days of poring over reports and files for clues, weeks of waiting for the shoe to drop; and Jack wasn't always available to keep him distracted. He'd perfected a state of zen in which he could process and respond to all information he was provided with whilst not thinking of anything much.

Brian Green, on the other hand, was oblivious to everything around him as he stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. He dropped it, spilling the water across the floor and his feet, when Ianto spoke behind him, "Terrible for the environment, that. I'm told that the tap water is safe."

"Who are you? And what are you doing in my kitchen?" He sounded unsure of himself, and squinted at Ianto. "Are you with the press?"

"Nope." He tossed an apple from hand to hand and watched Green's eyes track it. "I'm with Torchwood." He caught and held the apple and Green's face paled. "The phones are cut off, the door is locked and I've stolen your keys… and your children won't be home from school for hours, will they?"

The other man sank to the floor and sat in the puddle of spilled water. His eyes were red-rimmed and heavily shadowed, his hair was matted and stuck to his scalp, and the weight he'd lost showed in the sag and pallor of his skin. "What do you want?" he asked again. "I don't know anything, I never knew anything! I just did what I was told. And… and then they threw me away like so much garbage, just like you."

Ianto seethed, but he was careful to give Green his most reassuring smile as he came towards him. "There, this is what I want to know." He pulled a chair over and sat on it, which still left him towering over Green, but much closer. "It's all we can do, isn't it? Following orders from higher up, however high those orders go. It's not up to us to question them."

He nodded, gaze fixed on Ianto. "They're so powerful. So powerful, you can't imagine."

"Oh, I think I can, Brian." He leaned forwards and rested one hand on his shoulder, squeezing. "Who was it, Brian? Who told you what they'd done to save the world?"

"I…" He looked around. "I can't, they'll… my children."

"And what about Alice Carter, Brian? Didn't her son deserve protecting?" He squeezed again and his thumb dug into Green's shoulder. "Let me protect her for you."

He cried out and nodded, and rubbed at his shoulder when Ianto released him. "There's a department, off the records, tasked with protecting… things. Secrets."

"Government assassins?"

"No!" He grimaced, dropping his head back against the counter. "Not usually. They just… extradition and torture," he rushed out when Ianto leant forwards again. "We weren't supposed to know they even existed."

Ianto sucked in a deep breath and sat back in his seat. Green still cowered away from him, and whimpered when he stood up. "Do you know where they are?" he asked. "Brian!"

"I don't know!" he sobbed, and Ianto believed him. "They're near Cambridge, somewhere… or Oxford. I don't know which. I don't know any more!"

"You're pathetic and you make my skin crawl," Ianto told him. He collected his rucksack from next to the sofa and unlocked the door, throwing the keys at Green to make him jump. "And I didn't vote for you."

He strode from the house, swinging the keys of a stolen motorbike on one finger. In full view of the kitchen, he pulled on the helmet and revved the engine before roaring off down the road. He enjoyed the feel of speed down to the crossroads, all the way to the pub car park just beyond it. There were a few cars already there, so he tucked the bike in behind one of them, in the shade of a bare tree, and shed the jacket and helmet again. These he stashed in the hedge, and then he left them all behind and went to sit in the pub with a cheese burger and a pint, and the surveillance kit out on the table in front of him pretending to be a laptop.

The bug on the phone line sent him an alert that it was connected, and he picked up the headphones to listen to the conversation. Green was telling an unnamed operative, a man, that Ianto had been and threatened him, but he hadn't told him anything, and then Ianto had left on a motorbike in full leathers, heading for Cambridge. The operative promised that someone would be there soon and hung up, leaving Green talking to an empty line.

Ianto snorted and flipped the lid closed, pushing the burger away so that he could pack his bag again. He drained the glass and took it back to the bar to ask about the buses. There was one due from outside the pub in ten minutes, so he killed time in the toilets, mostly trying to navigate the cramped space with his backpack, and went out to catch it.

The bus was going to Thame, which Ianto remembered as being the nearest town. He bounded to the top deck, nearly overbalancing when the bus set off. It trundled through the countryside, into a shower that got heavier as they progressed and before he knew it they were in the town centre, such as it was. The rain was now persistent and running down the back of his neck, so he walked out of town until he passed a bed and breakfast with a notice in the window saying that they didn't accept Visa, and decided that that was the perfect place to stay for the night.

He got a room to himself, but the bathroom was shared with the other occupants of the B&B. Not that there were any. The couple who ran it were long-since retired, and it had been nearly as long since they got a new customer. They got the same people coming back every year, they told him, and they were always full for the festival. It didn't really matter. He'd paid his twenty pounds, got a room with a bed – for the first time since he left Jack – and they were going to feed him in the morning.

As the shower was available and not in the swimming baths three bus stops away, Ianto grabbed his washbag out of his rucksack and they towel that had been left on the bed, kicked off his boots and padded across the hall in his socks. He'd nearly run out of clean clothes and, although it wasn't high on his list of things to worry about, he wanted to do something about it. Shedding them felt better than it should have, and he didn't dare sniff them to see what they smelt like, so he kicked them into a pile by the door and afforded himself the luxury of a bath.

Steam curled up around him as he sank into the hot water, and he stifled a moan at the feel of his tense muscles relaxing in the heat. He ached from his toes to his shoulders after a week of sleeping on the floor and lugging his bag around in the bitter cold, looking over his shoulder at every turn for pursuit, and there was a sting of loneliness that ran deeper than the cold or the aches, somewhere that a warm bath couldn't touch.

He stayed there until the water turned cool, and made a dash across the hall in only a towel rather than put his grimy clothes back on. Redressed in his last clean clothes, and having put his washing into the care of the B&B owner because the nearest launderette was in Aylesbury, he wandered out into the dusk in search of food. The houses gave way to shops, pubs and take-aways as he wandered further into town, and the long queue in the fish and chip shop seduced him. Above the counter, a TV was showing the news in Chinese, and many of the people in the queue were watching it. He looked up, bemused by the apparent multilingual society found in Thame. A picture of Brian Green dominated half of the screen, and the person next to him nudged him. "What's a Chinese news show doing talking about him? What's he done this time, eh? They can have him, if they want him."

"It's a Chinese language channel, but UK based," his mouth explained without referring to his brain. His brain was still translating and processing the news. "He's dead. Police are treating it as suspicious."

"How do you know that?"

He blinked back into the chip shop and raised an eyebrow at his neighbour. "I speak Mandarin. Well, roughly. Enough to get that much."

"His children found him when they came home from school," a girl behind the counter explained, shovelling chips onto a tray. It was a huge stack of chips, and Ianto's scattered attention fixed on them and the enormous piece of fish. "They won't rule out suicide, but they say they're looking for a man on a motorbike."

"Well, if it were any more specific they'd have to have him already," a voice said, laced with acidic irony. "Good riddance, anyway."

The person next in line to Ianto reached the counter, and he was able to lean against the wall. The world was moving too fast. Someone cleared their throat and he looked up into the worred face of the girl who'd translated the news for them. "Sorry, miles away. Fish and chips please."

"Large or regular?"

He nodded over to the huge mountains of fish and chips that were now being wrapped up at the other end of the counter and smiled. "Whatever they're having."

The shop had a dining area with Formica tables and chairs from a school canteen. He found a seat in the corner, tucked out of the way, and picked at his dinner. Word was starting to spread about Green's death, and the general opinion was that he'd killed himself, whatever the police said. It was a shame for his children, but good riddance to bad rubbish, sweep it under the carpet and forget about it. He couldn't decide whether he loved or hated them for it.

X~X~X~X

He stayed in Thame a few days longer than he'd planned, until he couldn't justify the risk any longer. The thaw at the start of the month had been a ruse, and the weather was now bitterly cold, with biting winds and flurries of near-freezing rain that sought out every gap in his clothing, even when he was sure there weren't any, and the footpaths were slick with ice and slush from the roads. Faced with uncertain lodgings when he got to Oxford and the choice between that and the simple pleasures of a very comfortable - if empty - bed and a local population who wouldn't have cared if he had actually killed Brian Green, he'd delayed it for too long, and justified it by spending hours in the library, poring over books on local history for clues.

Mrs Manners knocked on the door and brought a basket of clothes into the room. "I've got the last of your washing, Andrew. Are you sure you have to go, though? It's been so nice having you around the house."

He smiled up at her and got up from his crouch, grimacing when his knees protested. "And it's been wonderful being here, but I do have to go. Thank you for the washing."

"Oh, it's the least I could do, pet. You wouldn't believe the trouble we had with that door. Never thought it could be so simple." She sighed. "Dennis has never been one for the simple solutions."

"Well, you know what to do next time." He collected together his things from the basket and packed them in the bag, squeezed around what was already in there. "And I'm sure Ian next door will help you if you tell him what the problem is."

"Yes, but he's not as cute as you are."

Ianto laughed and straightened up, picking his bag up and hoicking it onto one shoulder. He dug his wallet out of a pocket and counted out a hundred pounds and held it out to her. "There we go, Sheila. Thank you so much for a wonderful stay."

She tucked it into the pocket of her jeans and stepped back out of the doorway. "You will come back, won't you?"

"I promise." He bent down and kissed her cheek, then preceded her down the stairs to the front door. "Take care of yourself in this weather, won't you?"

"Yes, yes." She waved him off. "Enjoy London, dear."

He walked up the high street to the main bus stop and got on the first bus that came past. It took him back through Towersey, past abandoned police tape that fluttered in the breeze, past the pub with the bike still sitting under the tree. The village was eerily quiet in the frosty morning, the harsh lines of bare trees standing out stark against silvered fields. He settled down in his seat at the back of the bus, wrapping his scarf over his face and tucking his hands into his armpits. It bounced and rattled through the narrow lanes, through sleepy villages where Christmas decorations still hung in some windows and past empty bus stops with frozen puddles.

The final stop was at the bus station in High Wycombe. It was a thriving metropolis compared to Thame, and the busy crowd didn't spare him a glance, too absorbed in their own business and heads bent to the floor to keep out of the wind and rain. He wrapped his scarf tighter around his face and shrugged his shoulders, striding down the street. The shoppers pressed in on him, hurrying on with their errands to get home before darkness or more snow fell, but every time someone looked towards him or bumped against him he flinched.

He spent the afternoon in the graveyard, sheltering under the enveloping cover of an ancient yew tree, and emerged when night fell. The gates had been locked, so he found a damaged section of wall and scrambled over. It was eerily quiet now, and the first squall of rain drove the last few lingering shoppers back to their homes just as he got back to the centre of town. He stopped in an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant until they closed, and then picked his way through the town again.

Thame and safety seemed a very long way away when the teenagers re-emerged, most of them wearing too little for the cold weather and drinking too much. A group of them hurled abuse at him as he passed them and threw empty bottles at him, and he scuttled out of their way into a side street. Loud music boomed from the windows of a bar above an abandoned shop, and, after making sure no one was coming, he used a Torchwood lockpick to let himself into the shop.

Damp had seeped in through the chipboard over the windows and broken glass littered the floor. He checked again that the door was once again locked and picked his way across the glass carefully, hearing the crunch under his boots. The music pounded through the floor as a rumble of noise, and he extended his hands to feel for the wall in the absolute darkness. Once he found it he pressed his back against it and sank to the floor to feel through his bag for his torch. Its dim light only served to highlight his dismal surroundings and the feeling of cold damp, and even his sleeping bag did little to keep away the chill that ran bone-deep.

He hadn't slept by the time cold light filtered through from the back room. A grimy window had been left uncovered, and the sunlight crept in from the yard between the buildings. Ianto dragged himself to his feet and repacked his bag, settling it on sore shoulders and letting himself out onto the street again. No one was around to see him until he got onto the main high street, where teenagers and younger children hurried through on their way to school, kicking their feet through frozen puddles and trudging through slush. A greasy café provided him with a mug of terrible coffee and an equally bad fry-up, and let him linger until the shops opened. He left half the coffee and stopped off at the 99p Store before anyone else got there to buy a pack of gel pens, a money tin, a pack of coloured paper and a roll of tape, as well as a handful of chocolate bars, a pack of sandwiches and a couple of unchilled bottles of drink. A bus pulled up outside just as he finished paying, and he hurried out to get on it without looking at where it was going.

X~X~X~X

Reading was even more of a shock than High Wycombe had been. He stopped into a pub first to tidy himself up in the toilets and get a meal that didn't taste of regret, and as he sat at his table waiting for his food the TV started showing the news. The bad e-fit of him was back and he was still on the run, now very definitely the person who murdered Brian Green. Suicide, the reporter told him, had been categorically ruled out.

The police were looking for a young man named Ianto Jones, whose family had got caught up in the defeat of the 456 and, regrettably, his partner's nephew had been a victim. The murder of Brian Green was the act of a desperate man, driven to revenge by the destruction of his family on the Government's orders. Ianto absorbed it and let it wash over him with waves of resignation.

Someone at the next table leaned over to nudge him, and he found he was too tired to react other than to stare at them. The man didn't notice, nudging Ianto again and pointing at the TV. "You want to watch out, mate. The police will be down on you in a shot. You look just like him." He sighed and held out the tin that he'd just finished, and the man took it off him. "If I had a pound for every time..." he had to turn it back to read the whole thing again. "If I had a pound for every time someone told me I looked like Ianto Jones, I'd give it all to charity." He laughed and dug a pound out of his pocket, rattling the tin and hearing the change from Ianto's lunch. "Sounds like you're doing well, mate. That's clever, that is. Who's it going to?"

Ianto forced a smile and accepted the tin back. "Probably Comic Relief," he decided out loud. "We could all do with a laugh."

He emerged from the pub not long after and carried along the street, dragging his feet through the puddles and keeping his head down. People jostled him on their way past and glared at him for getting in their way, but he ignored them all and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, finding shelter. As long as it was light and busy there was nothing he could do but walk, and his weary feet carried him on a slow, meandering route out of the city centre and into the inner city, into the streets of empty shops and neglected houses. A fierce, screamed argument emanating from an open window startled him, and he pressed himself into a doorway whilst he calmed his breathing and took stock of his surroundings .

The scene was familiar from every industrial city he'd ever been to; worn-down houses with chipped and peeling paint around water-warped doors, grubby and potholed streets between them lined with well-used cars, windows either boarded and blind or sparkling clean. A door slammed and the argument ceased, pushing him out of his doorway and onwards. His skin crawled and he felt eyes on him, following him down the street . A single quiet footstep highlighted the sounds of someone not wanting to be heard, and he tucked his head down rather than give in to the urge to look behind him. When he got into a side alley between the houses his heart was racing, pounding against his chest, and his breaths were coming short and sharp, wrenching painfully through his throat. He clawed at the wall behind him with one hand and drew his gun, clenching it against his side and tilting his head back to catch his breath and to improve his sight down the alley.

A shadow fell across the end of the alley, and then a young man stepped into it and starting advancing on him, drawing a gun of his own. Ianto shrank back down the alley away from him. "Who's there?" he demanded.

"Ianto Jones..." the man called in a sing-song Essex accent that grated on Ianto's nerves. "End of the road, Ianto Jones. You got one mistake, you made it. Now we've got you."

He tipped his head back against the bricks and growled. "Fancy telling me what it was? I'm not supposed to be anywhere near Reading."

"That would be telling."

"And I would be asking." He raised his gun and shot the guy before he could move again. He crumpled into a heap at the entrance to the alley and Ianto hurried over to check his pulse. "I'm sorry," he whispered when he couldn't find one. He pinched the bridge of his nose and hunched over the body for a moment, all he could spare before he had to get up and away from the scene.

He kept walking away, further and further, as far as he could go before exhaustion forced him into a derelict factory, where he huddled in a corner and wept for the man he'd killed.

X~X~X~X

It rained the next day; hammering torrents of water that spilled off gutters and plastered his hair and clothes against him. Deep puddles formed in his path and the water splashed into his boots, soaking his already damp and filthy socks. His clothes and rucksack became so much heavier when waterlogged, and after the sleepless, cold, uncomfortable night he'd spent, every step was a chore. He passed the station and bought a ticket to Inverness, the furthest point he could think of, and hunched on the platform to wait for the first train that came along. The headline on the Metro screamed at him, but he ignored it in favour of stumbling onto the train and trying to tidy himself up before one of the self-absorbed commuters took time from their impossibly important self-contemplation to notice him. No one did.

He got off at the next station, still in Reading, and decided to make his way North, as per his ticket. The Southampton train, bound for Edinburgh, was due in in a few minutes, so he got a coffee at the station Starbucks and cradled it against his chest whilst he waited. The heat soaked through his gloves and warmed his hands at last, and by the time the train rolled in he felt human enough to walk among the other passengers.

It was the lull after the rush, so he was able to grab a window seat and set his bag down on the seat next to him, wrapping one arm around it and leaning against the window with his cheek pressed against the glass and his breath fogging the view. The train rolled through the edge of the town, past the back fences of neat gardens, and then into the damp, grey countryside along the banks of the Thames. His fingers plucked at the zip cover on his bag, and he kept his face to the window, away from anyone coming past to the toilet.

The conductor came past and looked at him closely as he punched his ticket, but he said nothing in response to Ianto's weary smile, just confirmed the time they were due in Edinburgh and moved on down the aisle. Ianto put his head back and closed his eyes, tightening his fingers in the handle of his bag. When they pulled in at the next station he didn't stop to check where they were, just grabbed his bag, tugged his hood up and pushed his way through onto the platform.

Behind him, the train pulled away, and he looked around for a sign of where he'd arrived and a departures board to find the next place he could get to on his ticket. The second sign he passed brought him up short, and he swore under his breath. He'd got off in Oxford.

He was torn, caught between fleeing for his own safety and the knowledge that he couldn't help Steven if he was killed, and knowing that every day he spent searching was another day Steven was their prisoner and that he couldn't live with the guilt of hiding. Someone bumped into him and he wheeled away from them, turning on his heel to find the exit and drawing the lockpick. He touched the device to one of the ticket barriers, keeping himself between it and the bored-looking guard, and headed into Oxford to find accommodation and his next lead.

X~X~X~X

The tin filled up too quickly over the next few days, whatever he did to avoid people. Every street seemed to have a 'wanted' poster warning people to stay away from him, and yet they flocked to him, being bought off time and time again with the request for money. At the same time as being exhilarated by it, he could feel it wearing him down. His home was a derelict pub without electricity, gas or water; food was cold and rare, bought on the days when he felt able to drag himself out of his shelter and walk to the 24-hour Tesco with the weight of his bag weighing him down; and his research was halted by the lack of direction and the hopeless isolation and fear ingrained in his situation. When, one morning, a young couple stopped by the table he was working at in the library and asked him if he was the man who killed Brian Green, and giving them the tin and lying his way out of it seemed like almost too much effort, he knew he'd lost.

He trudged out of the library, no closer to finding Steven and with the weight of the extorted money pulling him down. A car drove past him through a puddle, sending a wave up to his knees to that it soaked his jeans and ran down into his boots, and it crossed the line to more than he could take. The girl behind the bar in the next pub he passed served him two doubles of Whisky without asking questions, and he huddled over it in a corner with a mobile in his hand and his thumb hovering over the call button. The news caught his attention, showing the same story it had been for the week since he got to Oxford, but with an update. Ianto Jones had been seen at a motorway service station near Luton.

The Whisky burned down his throat and warmed him inside as he sat up straighter to watch the news. It took him a moment to recognise the stony-faced woman giving the press announcement, but once he placed her he had to dig his nails into the palms of his hand to control himself. He had only seen her three times, twice in the ruins of Torchwood when she'd stood over what had been his home and given the orders for Jack's body to be removed from it, and once when he'd rescued Jack from his concrete prison and she'd tried to stop them. Seeing her again now so cool and angry, knowing what she'd done to his family, made his blood boil with fresh determination.

At the bottom of the screen, the subtitles rolled a little behind the dialogue. As always, there were interesting spellings and missed words, but one discrepancy caught his eye. His lip-reading was poor, but good enough to recognise the words "Wednesday the sixth", and yet the subtitles had read "Monday the eleventh". He admired their use of technology, even as he loathed and detested everything they stood for, and raised his glass in a subtle salute before he downed it and stumbled out of the pub to find his way to the meeting point.


	5. Chapter 4

From the bridge over the motorway, Ianto could see the marked police car at the entrance to the car park, and one of the guards in the car park itself. A set of stolen keys jingled in his gloved hand, and his step bounced as he wound his way through the crowd to the Travelodge. The clerk behind the counter looked up at him reluctantly, and stabbed at the keyboard with one finger. "Do you have a reservation... sir?"

"No, I don't. Random stop," he explained with a false smile. "Do you have any vacancies?"

"We won't fill up till later," he explained in the same bored drawl. "Don't normally get people checking in before dark. It'll have to be a double room."

"Yep, that's fine. Plenty of space." He dug out his wallet and slid the card he'd selected onto the desk. It was one that Jack would be able to find if this all went wrong, but which he hoped wouldn't set off any alarms. "I probably won't stay all night. Is there an early checkout procedure?""

The clerk had a room key out for him, and he pointed with it at the self-service machines against the wall. "Just swipe it, pay any balance left on the room and drop it in the slot." He swiped it through the machine, tapped Ianto's false details in with two fingers and without asking for ID, and then handed it over. "Have a nice stay."

He smiled back and went back to the toilets to collect his rucksack, which he'd left locked in a cubicle. With that back on his back he slipped past the receptionist, who had turned his attention back to his phone, and padded down the corridor to his room. It was bare and simple - a bed, a desk with a TV and drink facilities and an en-suite bathroom. He dropped the bag onto the bed and fell forwards onto it, curling his fingers into the duvet and clinging to it until the urge to giggle had subsided.

When he persuaded himself to move again, he pulled himself from the bed and started unpacking his rucksack. He got everything spread out on the bed and selected the things he needed and needed to keep, then packed what he wouldn't need into the rucksack again and tucked it under the desk. Out on the bed he now had the lockpick device, which used a magnetic field to recreate the motion of the key and also had an override for swipe-card locks; his guns and multitool; the surveillance kit with all the information he'd gathered on notes inside it; one change of clothes; a razor and shaving gel; the tablet computers and two of the mobile phones; all the money he had left; his wash bag; the decoy tin and a bottle of vodka. He took his jumper to the bathroom and tossed it in the bath, then poured half of the bottle of vodka over it so that it would smell of drink, and turned to the mirror to apply hair gel to mess his previously neat beard and hair. Once that was done he poured the rest of the bottle over his head and went to lie on the bed and watch TV whilst it dried.

He got bored with waiting and the nerves starting making an appearance again, so he grabbed the nearly-dry jumper from the bath, stuffed the lock pick, a phone and as much money as he could carry in his pockets and a gun down the pack of his pants, checked the knife in his boot and headed out the door in search of trouble. The hotel was as empty as the clerk had said, and he was able to slip out of a fire exit at the back and skirt around it, keeping to the walls until he got back into the main building. It was busy here again, and people were staring at him, so he went to Burger King and bought himself a meal with a large coffee, and sat at the counter, facing out.

The woman came to join him after a few minutes, parting the crowds without thought as she advanced on him. People stared at her and then at him, recognising him for who he was at last, and they scattered with muted panic. He smirked at them and stuffed the napkin in on top of the chips, grimacing at the greasy feel on his fingers. "I got your message," he told her, finding his voice conveniently rough with disuse. "I don't think we've been introduced, though."

"You don't need to know who I am." She nodded at a family hurrying towards the exit. "Do you ever get frustrated by their tiny minds?"

"Nope. My life is all about letting them keep their minds small and safe." He pulled a face at a sip of the bitter coffee and set it aside again. "Or it was, until someone blew it up."

"If you leave now, we'll let you," she told him. "You can find Harkness, leave the country, and as long as you don't come back and don't talk to anyone, we won't bother you."

"That doesn't seem very fair." He attempted the coffee again. "Is he still evading you, then?"

"Harkness's whereabouts are unknown," she admitted. "And they can remain that way, if you take my offer."

He thought about this, then gestured at her with the coffee. "No."

"Jones, do I really need to tell you that the alternative is me arresting you now and you never seeing him again?" She turned to glare at him. "My men surround this area; you have no chance of escape, unless you accept my offer."

"And do you think for one second that I'm going to back down when you have my family prisoner like this?" He slammed the coffee down so that it spilled over his hand and scalded him. "I'm not going to stop until I have brought you down and the people I love are safe from you, once and for all?"

"What about your sister? What if I arrested her as well? Or your niece and nephew." She gripped his arm and dragged him from his set. "I'm tired of games, Jones. You're under arrest."

He let her drag him from the chair and stumbled against her heavily, knocking her off her balance despite her strength. That moment was all he needed to drag his gun out and strike out at her with it, too close to risk firing, and bring it down on her temple and then her forehead. A kick to the back of her knees brought her down and he rammed her face-first into the counter he'd been sitting at.

His victory was short-lived, though, as men and women appeared at the ends of the corridors and advanced on him, guns drawn. He grabbed the woman's gun from her as she struggled to get up, kicked her down again and leapt over the counter into Burger King to slam his hand against the fire alarm. The staff who had hidden in the back room screamed and did nothing to stop him as he hurtled past them into the delivery area at the back and into the enclosed yard. With minutes to go before the agents got there, he unlocked the gate at the back and pushed it wide open, then dove behind the bins and pressed his back against the wall, clutching the guns in his hands and trying to calm his hammering heart and rapid breathing.

When the agents came running through the yard they examined the gates and the van that had been unloading there, but Ianto stayed hidden in his corner. They posted a guard in the yard in case he came back and left him trapped there for hours, shivering in his damp jumper and jeans that had soaked up water from the rank puddle he'd sat in. His breath formed clouds in front of him, however lightly he tried to breathe, and he closed his eyes rather than look at the signs he was giving off. It was an interminable age before his guard muttered an agreement and an assent and finally left him behind, locking the gate and leaving him alone in the yard. Even with the guard gone, and the workers starting to bring bin bags out to the yard again, he waited until the moon had risen over the yard before he crept from his hiding place and slunk into the car park.

He used the lock pick to open a car that was hidden from the CCTV under a tree and cranked up the heating, waiting to get his shaking under control before he attempted to move. The motorway was nearly empty when he drove up to the next roundabout and turned around to come back, and he entertained the idea that he could have crossed it on foot before sense crept back in. He knew he should move as soon as he could and get as far away as possible, but the crushing disappointment of finding his room empty of Jack and the surveillance kit still recording the bug he'd planted in his clothes, all the could do was turn it off, dump his clothes on the floor and fall into bed .

X~X~X~X

Loud voices in the corridor woke him the next morning, and he dragged himself into the bathroom to run a bath and change his appearance with the utmost reluctance. Whilst the tiny bath filled with hot water he ran the basin full and, using a whole pack of disposable razors and a pair of scissors, shaved off the beard, revealing too-pale skin with every swipe of the dull razors. He stared into his own eyes and didn't recognise himself - he was gaunt and haggard, red-rimmed eyes sunk in a thin face that was now lined with worry. It was no wonder that people had been so willing to believe that he wasn't the fresh-faced outlaw that the newspapers had painted him as.

The water sloshed above the outflow, so he set aside his contemplation and turned the taps off. Sitting on the side of the bath he pulled the plug to let some of the water out, and before long he was sliding into the shallow water, tucking his knees up to his chest so that he fitted in the small space. The hot water washed away layers of grime, and he ran the bath again twice before he felt really clean and he could run his fingers through his hair without grimacing.

Once he pulled himself out of the bath he leaned against the counter and stared at himself a while longer, then pulled a pair of scissors from his wash bag and cut his hair. It dropped around him in damp, curling, clumps, falling to the counter and littering across it, across his arms and his chest. When he'd finished restyling his hair it was short and blond-tipped, spiked with gel into soft peaks, away from his usual quiff. "Oh god," he muttered, patting it to make sure it had set, "I'm a meringue."

He tidied everything up in the bathroom, sweeping his hair clippings into a bundle of toilet roll and dropping them in the bin, then packed up his satchel with the things he needed, put the things he wanted in the rucksack and took them both out to the car park, checking out on his way out. A sportscar two rows away from the motel had a suit bag hanging in the passenger window, and when he opened the boot to put his rucksack in there he found a set of golf clubs, a weekend bag and a work bag. He grinned and slammed the boot shut, then slid into the driver's seat, adjusted the mirror, and took off for Cambridge.

X~X~X~X

The university library was conveniently full of hidden corners and a huge archive of the Cambridge local paper. He left his rucksack in the empty house he'd taken up residence in so that he could arrive each day with the morning rush and sit himself down in a deep armchair with a stack of newspapers and read through them, studying even the tiniest articles for anything that hinted at a location for the base. It was soothing, in a way, drifting backwards through time in the life of a city he'd only rarely visited whilst surrounded by the quiet, studious hum and the rustle of paper.

Students came past him occasionally, stepping over his legs and giving him absent smiles. Most of them seemed to be using the aisle as a shortcut between the stairs and the DVD section in the next set of shelves, but some were looking for the newspapers and city yearbooks around him, their fingers trailing along the shelves or tapping against the spines. They paid him no heed and he did the same, just shifting out of the way when they needed him to and hiding behind his paper.

As a result, it came as a shock when someone cleared their throat above him. He lowered the paper and looked up at the girl; she had brown hair that zig-zagged around her face and a pile of books tucked under one arm, and her gentle eyes studied him for longer than his nerves were comfortable with. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but are you Ianto Jones?"

He sighed heavily and fished the tin out of his satchel, holding it out to her and rattling it. "Pound in the pot, please."

She took it from him and read it. "Clever. Very clever. Do people usually fall for it?" She put a pound in the tin anyway, then looked both ways down the alley and leaned closer to him. "You can trust me. I know you didn't kill him."

He raised an eyebrow. "How could you possibly know that?"

"Because it was Department X."

Ianto stared up at her, torn between hope and abject amusement. "Oh brilliant, a conspiracy theorist."

"What's that supposed to mean?" She folded her arms and glared down at him. "There's so much going on that they don't tell us about, like the terrorist attacks on Downing Street and Canary Wharf – they weren't terrorist attacks."

He closed his paper, set it back on the pile with the others and folded his hands behind his head. "And what are you going to do if I am a notorious serial killer on the run from justice? Buy me coffee?"

"Not here, the coffee's terrible here." She offered him her phone with a photo showing on the screen. "I'm Jane, and you should know that they're waiting outside for you."

"Shit." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them again her hand was still there, so he shook it briefly. "I need to get out of here. And I still haven't found what I needed."

"Conspiracy theorist, remember?" She passed him the tin back , tucked her hands into the pocket of her hoody and tilted her head. "Do you trust me?"

"Not in the slightest. For all I know you tipped them off and then came to delay me." He tidied up the papers and gathered his things together again. "No offence, but there are people trying to kill me."

"None taken. I wouldn't trust me either if I were you." She took the seat he'd just vacated and dug her computer out of her bag. "But you do need every ally you can get."

He paused halfway down the aisle and turned back to look at her. "Why would you help me?"

"Because I want to know what happened to Steven and Alice Carter." She closed her laptop again and rested her hands on top of it. "Ianto Jones would not have killed Brian Green out of revenge. Someone somewhere is lying, and I want to know who. You tell me what's really going on, and I'll help you find your answers."

"Okay." He held his hand out for hers again. "Ianto Jones, Torchwood agent."

"Jane Simpson, student." She shook his hand and used it to tug him behind her. "We'll use the side entrance and go out through the woods and around the sports field, then cross over through St. John's to get to the river."

"Local guide, I like it." He followed her through the shelves to the back staircase. "Here, let me carry your books for you."

She passed them over to him, brushing her hair out of her face when she had her hands free again. "I do like a gentleman." She chatted easily as they went down the stairs, calling him Andrew and telling him about her terrible last lecture and how lucky he was not to have her lecturer any more. He didn't have chance to do more than grunt agreement until they reached the door, where curtains of rain fell between them and the trees that surrounded this side of the building. Next to him, Jane fumbled in her bag and brought out a yellow umbrella. He raised an eyebrow at her as she put it up and she shrugged, looping her arm through his and tugging him under its shelter until they were dry and their faces were hidden. "I like it," she told him. "It makes even the worst weather that bit brighter."

"And no one will ever lose you in a crowd." The rain hammered on the canvas, drowning out all opportunity for conversation, and they dashed through the puddles that formed on the gravel paths into the shade of the trees. Here the rain was more distant, but heavier drops falling from the leaves still required the use of the umbrella. Jane was tucked close against his side, a warm and solid weight that stumbled against him occasionally to avoid branches or puddles, and they laughed together. He realised now how much he'd missed the companionship of living and working with someone – it wasn't just Jack, although he ached with how much he missed him, but it was the ease of being able to trust someone, being able to talk about anything and nothing, just not being alone.

She caught his silence and squeezed his arm. "You've gone all quiet."

"Just thinking." He looked up at the world, what he could see of it beyond the bright yellow, and sighed. "I miss my boyfriend."

"Oh…" They reached the edge of the wood and began skirting the playing fields. "Is he nice?"

"Not always. He's an arrogant, egotistical, self-centred prick sometimes." He swallowed hard and smiled at her. "But mostly he's nice, yeah. He's insecure, a bit, and so lonely."

"Even with you?"

"I make it easier," he said. "Knowing that I'm there, and that I don't demand more of him than he can give, I don't expect him to have all the answers, and I can tell when he needs his space and when he just needs to curl up on the sofa and be held… I worry about him. I hope he's alright."

"I bet you can't wait to be back with him." Jane dropped her gaze to her feet again, and brought his attention to a gnarled root that was about to trip him. "My boyfriend dumped me just before Christmas," she blurted. "He said that he realised that he didn't want me to come home with him, and that that meant that we weren't in for the long haul, so he didn't want to drag it out for either of us."

"Bastard."

"That's what I said!" She sighed. "He didn't get it, though. Men."

"They're useless," he agreed. She looked sideways at him and they laughed. "I'm glad you found me. I missed having someone to talk to."

"You must have been so alone the last few months." She lifted the umbrella again and made a show of studying the woods. "It's this way."

The rain didn't let up for the rest of the walk, and it was quite a long way back to Jane's house. They passed the grand frontage of St John's College, and Ianto stopped to admire it for a moment before she ushered him on through the puddles. By the time they got indoors they were soaked to the skin, and Ianto dripped miserably onto the floor whilst she went to get towels.

"They should be warm," she told him as she came back downstairs. "Take your boots off and leave them by the door. Have you got a change of clothes?"

"No, I've just got this bag." He peered into his satchel and grimaced. "Even my spare socks are soaked."

"Bugger. I'll go and get my dressing gown – it's the only thing that might be big enough to fit you." She ran back upstairs, towelling her hair dry with one hand and calling down to him as she went, "There's only three of us here, and we're all girls, otherwise we'd have something for you to use. If my useless ex hadn't taken everything with him…"

"It's okay. Clothes will dry. I'll just have to sit around naked in your living room." A moment later, something soft and yellow dropped on him from the top of the stairs, and he fought down a panic whilst he got it off. It turned out to be a tie-dyed yellow dressing gown, just big enough to go around him. He glanced up the stairs and shut himself in the windowless kitchen to strip out of his clothes, leaving him standing in his boxers, which clung to him uncomfortably, and Jane's dressing gown.

"You look ridiculous," she told him when she got back downstairs, dressed in dry clothes and wrapped in a dressing gown that may have matched the one he was wearing once, before it lost a fight with something blue. Water dripped from her hair, which she'd pinned up on the top of her head, and it flicked onto him when she pushed him out of the way of the counter. "Do you want a drink? We've got tea and coffee."

"Is it instant?"

"Of course."

"Tea then, please." He stepped back out of her way and tucked his hands into the pockets of the dressing gown, finding a post-it note and a pen. "White, all the sugars."

"All the sugars?" She chuckled to herself and waved a spoon at the room. "I would have tidied, but I wasn't expecting you. Do excuse the mess."

"It's fine." He accepted a biscuit when she offered it and propped himself against the counter. "So… housemates in?"

"Not until later," she assured him. "Mindy's working until about 8, and Cathy's… doing whatever she does. They're never home. Neither am I, usually. I thought I'd make a special case."

"I'm flattered." The kitchen had suggested that they weren't in it a lot. Empty mugs were stacked on the drainer instead of put away and the bin was full of take-away and instant meal boxes, which accounted for the lack of plates on the drainer. "Nice place."

"It does us." She finished the teas and handed one to him. "Right, let's go to my room. Before you say anything, I've got all my files up there, and there might be something you can use."

He followed her up the stairs, then up another flight of stairs to an attic room not unlike the ones at the Brecon farm. A window under the eaves on each side provided the light, and everything fitted into the slope of the roof, including the pictures that were stuck to it at top and bottom. He leaned back to look at them and found himself looking at his own image. "Jane… this is starting to feel a bit stalker-ish."

"It's all in the public domain. Well, apart from that," she admitted, indicating the photo he was looking at. "You have no idea how hard it is to get hold of photos of you."

"No, I know exactly how hard it is to get hold of photos of me." He squinted at it and tried to work out when it was taken. "There's a computer virus that erases any photos of me or the team on any computer connected to the internet. It's why they had to use a sketch for the papers, and why it's not a perfect likeness. How did you get this one?"

"One of my friends got it from someone in Cardiff. You've got quite a fan-club, but I suspect it's your computer virus that makes it hard to maintain." She sighed and flopped back in the middle of the double bed. "Even after it was all over the papers, we were still having to use secure servers and Royal Mail to communicate with each other. We have a magazine and everything."

"I'm impressed." He trailed along the wall, looking at the photos and newspaper clippings. "You're really good."

"I am at Cambridge," she scoffed. "So, are you going to tell me what's going on?"

"Right, yes." He looked over his shoulder at her and frowned at the notepad she had open. "Are you studying journalism by any chance?" When she nodded, he rolled his eyes and came to sit on the end of the bed with his legs crossed. "I should have known. Right, so…It goes back to the 456. The children stopped because aliens were using them to deliver a message. Someone didn't want Torchwood getting involved with it, so they blew up our base and tried to kill us." He paused for her to comment, but she only waved him on. "We survived, we found out what they were doing, about the fact that they were hosting the aliens at Thames House. We went there, rocks fell, everyone died."

This time she did comment. "Everyone but you and Captain Jack Harkness… why did you survive?"

"He can't die, I picked up an immunity to the virus somewhere." He shrugged one shoulder and leaned back on his hands, careful not to fall off the bed. "Torchwood, something like that. Anyway, I woke up in hospital about a month later, so I only know what I've been told from there on."

"Go on…"

"They kidnapped Jack's… sister." Jane raised her eyebrow, which he ignored. "They went after my sister as well, but only to see if they were harbouring me. They kidnapped Jack's sister and her son and took them to a secure facility near London, to use as a bargaining tool against him."

"Alice and Steven Carter," she guessed.

He nodded. "Alice and Steven. I knew that they existed, but I'd never met them. We knew that they were in custody, but we didn't know where. We still don't know where it was. What we do know is that… they destroyed the aliens. They projected a signal back to them, which fried their systems or their brains or something, I don't know what. UNIT shot their ship out of the sky as it fell out of orbit."

Jane scribbled that down and looked up at him. "And neither of them has been seen since?"

"Alice showed up on our doorstep a month before Christmas. Steven… they told us that Steven had been killed – they used him to create the signal to kill the 456, and it killed him." He took a deep breath and amended, "Or so they told us."

She paused with her pen hovering over the paper. "You think he's alive?"

"So I've been told," he confirmed. "We were contacted by… an ally, you don't need to know more than that," he told her, despite her scowl. "If this works, you'll know a whole lot more. Anyway, she contacted us and told us that Steven was alive and still being held prisoner. We did as much research as we could, but apparently we were getting too close or doing something someone didn't want us to do, because we were warned that a warrant had been issued for our arrest and they were coming for us."

That got added to the notes as well, and she had to start a fresh page. "Do you believe that?"

"People keep trying to kill me." He shrugged again. "I took it as confirmation. And Brian Green confirmed it."

"So you did go and see him?"

"Yes." He rubbed the back of his neck. "He told me everything, worryingly easily. I threatened him a bit, sure, but not enough to get what I did out of him. I think he thought that he was keeping me distracted whilst reinforcements came."

"And did you kill him?"

"No," he told her firmly. "I left him alive and well, and listened in to a conversation he had with someone from... Department X. I have a recording of that conversation to prove it."

"So… they killed him to shut him up?" She frowned at him. "That doesn't make sense if he'd already told you what he knew."

He spread his hands. "Maybe it was a punishment, maybe they were shutting the door after the horse had bolted, or maybe he lied about how much he told me. I don't know. All I know is that the next day I was plastered over the papers, having apparently murdered him in his home and left him for his wife to find. Which is very odd, because I know that the next people in the house after me were the forces of darkness."

"Right." She capped her pen and reached for her computer. "I'll order food, you look through the stuff on the wall and see if you can get anything useful. Then we'll get down to it and see what we can find."

It was past midnight before they were finished. Between the empty curry trays they had arranged neat stacks of notes spread around an OS map of the region and a bright pink post-it note with an arrow pointing to the suspected location. Ianto settled back and smiled with satisfaction. "You are something special," he told Jane. "I'd work with you any day."

He turned to look at her and found her closer than he'd expected, her face flushed with pleasure and draped in soft shadows. "It was brilliant working with you." She flicked her gaze down to his lips for a moment, then back up to his eyes. "Ianto…"

"Jane." He swallowed again and brought his thumb to her lips. "I can't help feeling that this is a mistake."

"Is that a no?" Her lips moved against his thumb, and her tongue flicked out against it. "Because if it is…"

"It's not a no." He slid his hand down to cup her cheek and tilt her face up into the light. "What if I offer you a job after this?"

"Are you likely to?"

"Very." He pulled his hand back and ran it through his hair instead. "I'm sorry. I want to, but… Jack."

"I understand." She got to her feet and went to the window, kneeling next to it to close the blinds. "Sex is no fun with regrets."

"You sound so like him." He still hadn't moved. When she looked back at him he forced himself to meet her eyes. "I'm not sure I'd regret it."

She returned and bent over him. Her hair fell around his face as her lips touched his gently, just for a moment, and surrounded him even after she pulled back. "It's just sex. And it's not cheating if you're thinking of him the whole time."

He rested his hands on her waist to steady her when she kissed him again. This time it was firmer and he parted his lips to let her deepen it. She was soft and curvy under his hands, tasted of chocolate and mint and woman, and when she led him back to the bed and pulled off her T shirt he found that he was right. He didn't regret it at all .

X~X~X~X

Jane's alarm screamed at them from somewhere on her desk, and she buried her head under her pillow rather than deal with it. Taking sympathy on her, Ianto dragged himself out of bed and found it, hidden under a newspaper, and turned it off. He picked up his discarded clothes and started redressing whilst she unburied herself to watch.

"Are you going to go after them?" she asked at last, wrapping her arms around her knees over the duvet. "Today?"

"I have to." He paused in pulling his hoody on to look at her. "Every day I wait they get closer to me, and now to you. I shouldn't have come here."

She growled and climbed across the bed to the wardrobe. "But you did, and now you know where you're going. What do you need me to do?"

"You need to keep your head down for a while." He looked around for his boots and remembered that they were downstairs, then started packing things back into his satchel instead. "I'll give you the address of someone who'll help you."

"I can't just hide whilst you're..." She waved a hand at him and propped the other on her hip. "There has to be something I can do, surely? Now you have the information, can't we take it to UNIT, or... anyone?"

He looked back at her and forced a smile. "My list of allies grows thin. I don't know who I can trust." He sighed and grabbed a Post-It note from the desk, scribbling the address down on it. "You need to go to Sarah Jane Smith – she lives in North London, and she has access to the Subwave network. If anyone can help us, they'll be on that network. I can't go and put her in danger like that, but you'll be safe."

She took the note from him and twisted it between her fingers. "I should come with you..." Folding the note, she turned away and picked out a pair of walking boots. "London, right. I'll borrow Dai's car – he won't mind. Less traceable than train or bus, I guess."

"I'll give you some cash, and... and the surveillance kit," he decided. "Everything I know is saved in there, all the evidence. You'll need it."

"I didn't expect to bring down the government until after I graduated." She looked up at the clock and frowned. "Do you think my lecturer will mind me missing one for this?"

"Extra credit, probably. You could even do an assignment on it." Ianto set aside everything he couldn't take with him, keeping the lockpick and his multi-tool, a handful of cash and his guns, and passed her the surveillance kit. "Look after that."

They walked into town together and parted ways outside her friend's house when she stopped in to borrow his car. Ianto hurried on to a book shop where he bought a handful of OS maps, including the right one, and then to the bus station. It took him three buses and two hours to get out to a village near the location of the base and, after stopping to pick at a sandwich in the pub, he set off walking to get there before nightfall.

It was heavy going by a round-about route along the edge of frozen fields. His boots, battered by the weeks of wear, protected his ankles on the uneven surface, but the branches of the hedges that lined his path tugged at his clothes and scratched at his face if he let his attention wander. The sun dipped behind the hedge, hiding the path in shadow and making it more perilous even as it gave him extra cover, and the temperature dropped with it and he started shivering, even in the thick jumper and at his quick pace. He wrapped his arms around his chest and tucked his face down into his damp scarf.

The cry of a fox rang across the fields, stabbing across his taut nerves like a shard of the ice underfoot. He was left shaken in the silence afterwards, disconcerted, distressed and completely alone. Each step was forced, one foot in front of the other, trudging onwards against the clock, knowing that he wouldn't survive a night out here.

He rounded a small thicket of evergreen trees and came to a tall fence surrounding a group of buildings. There was still just enough light in the sky for him to make out the shapes of the buildings and the spaces between them, the occasional glint of light on glass at the windows, but the whole area was still and silent. Keeping his back to the forest, he edged to a post along the fence and pressed the lockpick against it. It flashed blue twice to indicate that the alarms had been deactivated, and he swapped it for his multi-tool. Down the line of the post, from his eye height downwards, he severed the link between the fence and the post, creating a neat opening. As soon as he reached the bottom he ducked through and used pieces of wire cut from the fence to hold the gap closed enough to pass inspection in the darkness.

Concrete blocks loomed out of the darkness at him like ghostly ships in the fog. Everything he saw suggested that the site was as disused as it purported to be, apart from the maintenance of the fence and the UPVC around some of the high windows. He opened the door to one of the buildings into a room of dust and neglect and sighed to himself. There was a large hangar in the middle of the complex, but getting to it would leave him exposed if there were anyone around.

Something crunched behind him, and he spun around to face it, pressing his back against the wall of the building and sliding into the doorway. The light of a torch panned across him, and he had barely a second to react before he felt a blossoming agony, heard the retort of a gun and the guard's shouts, and had to sink to the ground under waves of dizzy nausea. Blood stained his hands, bright red in the torchlight, and when he looked up the guard was towering over him .

"Jones is here," the man reported with amused frustration. "Don't know how he got in, but he's not going anywhere. I'll bring him round to the med suite; with any luck, blood loss'll get him in the night."

Ianto closed his eyes and rested his head against the doorframe, wracked with shivers and in agony from his wound. Darkness pressed on him, and when the guard dragged him to his feet and pushed him forwards he felt himself stumble and then nothing.


	6. Chapter 5

The darkness lightened into a grey fog that lingered around his mind even once the room came into focus. It was brightly lit and silent save for his breaths. A digital clock above the door told him that it was half past two in the morning, and in trying to move from the bed he realised that he was handcuffed to it by one wrist and heavily drugged.

It was a bare hospital room that stank of disinfectant and stagnant air. The machinery against the walls looked several years out of date, and he was glad that they hadn't been using it to monitor him, despite the neglect and lack of care that that implied. He could have died during the night, and no one would have known.

He shivered at the thought and tugged against the cuff. It rattled against the bed and he hissed at it to keep quiet whilst he twisted his wrist this way and that, trying to get loose. No one came to investigate, so he dragged himself out of the bed and explored as far as he could reach. One cupboard, under a sink that wasn't attached to the water supply any more, contained several bottles of liquid soap and disinfectant, which he seized and brought back to the bed. It was awkward with only one hand, but he managed to get the top off some of the soap bottles and start pouring it over his trapped hand. The other open bottles leaked over the bed, and he nudged them with his leg in an attempt to stop them.

Whilst he poured the soap on with his free hand he kept tugging at the other, contorting it into different positions to fit better through the ring of the cuffs. They scraped against his skin, biting into it in a way that would have been painful without the numbing drugs, but he felt nothing beyond a mild discomfort and a fascination with the way his blood mixed with the soap bubbles.

His hand slid further through the too-tight ring of metal, and he finally felt the pain when a particularly sharp wrench pulled his thumb out of its socket. He bit down on the scream and cradled his hand to his chest, closing his eyes against the tears. He was free, but now he wasn't sure he wanted to be.

The pain receded gradually into a dull throbbing, but it was still too intense for him to try to manipulate his thumb back into position. His hand was scraped raw by the biting metal and dripping blood onto the covers, so he dragged himself from the bed to search through the other cupboards. He found a box of sterile wrappings and fumbled them around his now-useless hand, clenching it to hold them in place and biting down on a scream.

He struggled to his feet and swayed against the wall, clutching it with his good hand for support. Blood pounded in his ears and that, and the sound of his own ragged breathing, drowned out the world around him. Every step to the door and onto the corridor threatened to bring him to his knees again, and by the time he got to the opposite wall from his room he was swaying and dizzy, and the world was in shades of grey. Still, he pushed himself onwards, pushing open doors as he passed them, searching for Steven. There were more empty treatment rooms, dusty storerooms and cluttered offices. A door opened at his touch, catching him by surprise and stripping him of his support, and he swayed in the doorway until he found the far doorframe and clung to it whilst he waited for the world to right itself.

Ahead of him, another door opened, and the woman who had haunted him for six months stood framed in the doorway. She sneered and reached to her side, to her empty holster. Ianto hurled himself at her, bearing down on her with his greater height and pushing her back into her office, but two months on the run had taken their toll on Ianto's strength. Her fingers wrapped around his wrists, able to close around them, and she twisted him around and threw him against her desk. Her lips moved and he heard noises, jumbled and mixed together with the roaring, but comprehension was beyond him. When she reached for her gun, safely out of the way on a side table, he grabbed the only moment available to him, wrapped his hand around something on her desk and lunged for her. They struggled, and as she pushed him back and started to bring her gun around he lashed out with the object in his hand, aiming for her neck.

She slumped against him instantly, and her weight against him carried him to the floor, screaming. Slick, red blood spilled across the concrete floor, staining the loose hospital gown he'd been dressed in, and coated his hands. Her eyes were wide and glassy, glaring at him in death, and he had to roll to the side to throw up, the rippling shudders ripping through his injuries and amplifying them. He convulsed on himself over and over again, retching until there was nothing left in him.

How long he lay there he didn't know, but his hearing and vision had cleared somewhat by the time he managed to push her off him, collect her gun from the floor and crawl into her chair. The computer was still switched on and logged in, warning him that it would lock down if he didn't do something soon, so he moved the mouse and started reading through the files she had open. Words flew past him, slipping through his comprehension and away, and he sent the whole lot to the printer and started searching for a memory stick instead. He found one in the drawer and cleared the music off it, but when he tried to save the files onto it the computer refused him. When that failed he tried to email them to himself, tried to upload them to a storage area, tried to connect with UNIT's computer system in a last act of desperation, but nothing worked.

A penknife and a book of stamps on the desk caught his eye, and he pulled up a Word document instead and typed out Sarah Jane's address. He sent it to the printer twice and shut the computer down, then found a box and dragged the computer tower out from under the desk. His fingers fumbled on the screwdriver, the blood making them sticky and slippy and his injured hand sending blinding pain up his arm when he used it for as little as supporting the screwdriver, but he got the back off the computer and, with a piece of paper between his fingers and the delicate drive, he extracted the hard drive and put it in the box, then resealed the computer tower, put it back where it belonged and attached the first address to the outside of the box, sealing it, attaching a stamp and putting the whole thing into the dead woman's out-tray. Then he got a large envelope from her drawer, finding her keys at the same time, and put the printed information into that, attached the address and stamps, and took it, the gun and the keys down the corridor in search of another out-tray.

With the keys, he was able to get into some of the locked rooms. The first proved to be another office, where he deposited the envelope carefully, hiding it under another sheet of paper to conceal the bloody fingerprints. There were more offices, cleaner than the unlocked ones he'd passed, and then, in a small room with a bed and a desk, there was a boy asleep. Asleep until Ianto staggered in, anyway. He stared at Ianto with wide eyes that flicked from the gun to the blood and up to his face, clutching the duvet against his chest.

Ianto blinked slowly and grabbed at the chair so that he could sink into it. "Steven?"

The boy, blond-haired and blue-eyed, nodded and raised the duvet over his face. "Please don't hurt me."

"No! No no..." He rubbed at his face with the hand that held the gun, dropping it when he realised he still held it. "I'm not... I'm not here to hurt you. I've come to rescue you. Been looking everywhere for you. I'm... Your mum. Your mum sent me. I'm not your mum."

"Mum's okay?" The duvet lowered again and Steven leaned forwards. "Can I go back to her now?"

"Yes, but we have to be quiet." He pressed a finger to his lips and got to his feet again. The concrete floors were cold, and Steven's feet, like his own, were bare. "Slippers, do you have slippers?" He found a pair in the bottom of the wardrobe and brought them over with a blanket, which he wrapped around Steven's shoulders. "Now, come on quietly," he instructed when Steven was wrapped up to his satisfaction. "Home."

X~X~X~X

Steven was shaky on his legs after his long incarceration and still wary of Ianto, but he let him lead him down the corridor in search of an exit. Every door they passed led into an office or a lab or a storeroom, and Ianto had stopped checking them when the smell of cigarettes pulled him up short. He returned to a door he'd ignored and sniffed again, leaning in to smell the doorknob.

"What are you doing?" Steven asked, hugging his arms around himself. The pyjamas didn't fit right, and the gesture created a gap between the top and the trousers. Ianto caught hold of the blanket and wrapped it around him more securely. "Why were you sniffing the door?"

"Smoke," he explained. "Cigarettes. It's either a store cupboard or the outside."

The handle turned easily, no alarms went off, and he breathed a sigh of relief at the first breath of fresh air on his face. Before anyone could catch them there, he ushered Steven out and closed the door behind them. It was still dark, and dawn wouldn't touch the horizon for hours at this time of year, but lights from the other buildings around them showed the faint outlines of the area. He walked forwards, rough asphalt painful under his bare feet, and was glad that he'd found the slippers for Steven. As he got used to it he picked up speed, one foot in front of the other.

Voices behind him took him by surprise and he stumbled, turning back to check on them. Two men stood silhouetted in the doorway he'd just come out of, glows of red in their hands, at their mouths. He was frozen in place, staring at them until one of them turned and stared back. "Shit."

He grabbed Steven again and pushed forwards, away from the men and into the darkness. Their light-coloured clothes aided their pursuers in seeing them, and he could hear the alarm being raised behind him. Tears flowed down his cheeks despite his attempts to stop them, and his steps were growing slower, holding Steven back. "Go," he told him, pushing him away. "Run for the perimeter, hide. There's a gap, in the fence." He stood on broken glass and gasped at the sharp pain. Lights were approaching to the side now as well, and the voices behind him were louder. "Steven, run!"

"I can't!" He sobbed. "I don't know where…"

"Go and find Jack," he told him again. They were still hobbling on as fast as Ianto could, but it wasn't fast enough, the lights and the voices were coming closer, resolving themselves into an army of vehicles and individual shouts. "Go!"

The boy stumbled when he pushed him and, with one last tear-stained glance at their pursuers, he bolted into the night, a smudge of white disappearing towards the fence. Ianto changed tack, veering towards one of the buildings. It brought him closer to the oncoming vehicles, but away from Steven.

He choked on a sob and stumbled again, clasping his hand to his side to stop the bleeding. It throbbed in time with his racing heart, and he could feel the warm, wet sensation of blood soaking the hospital gown. Behind him he heard a car door slam, voices rising, and then he pressed too hard on the injury and the grey at the edges of his vision grew and engulfed him in a silent blackness.


	7. Epilogue

The ceiling was stark white, and framed by the drape of curtains from a wooden rail. Sunlight filled the room from a window that showed through the curtain on his left, and footsteps from the corridor outside and the gentle beeping of the machines watching over him rang in a syncopated melody. The bedding was soft and warm, gentle to the touch.

One of his hands was bandaged and, he realised when he tried to move his fingers, splinted. The other was cradled in both of Jack's, his thumbs rubbing over the back of his hand, and Jack squeezed to acknowledge Ianto's attention. "Hey," he whispered. "You back with us this time?"

He blinked at him. "This time?" His voice was rough and his throat dry, but he held on to Jack's hand when he tried to get up for water. "No, stay..."

"Okay." Jack raised Ianto's hand to his lips and kissed it. "You've been in and out since yesterday evening. We had a conversation earlier."

"I don't remember it." He closed his eyes and let Jack's hand go. "Okay, yes please to the water."

Jack chuckled, a strained sound, and leaned over him to kiss his forehead before he went to get Ianto a drink and inform the nurses or whatever he needed to do. He was only gone a minute or less, but Ianto's heart was racing again by the time he returned, and he reached out for his hand again as soon as he was back in his chair. "Doctor Henson is going to come and check you over in a minute," he told Ianto, feeding him ice chips with one hand so that he could keep hold of the other. The grip Ianto had on him must have been painful, but he didn't mention it. "He's not impressed with your self-preservation instincts," Jack continued in a tone that, as controlled as it was, let on that he agreed with the doctor's assessment. "But we're all impressed with the heroics, you'll be pleased to hear."

"That's more your style than mine," he croaked. "But I did try to live up to your example."

"Don't..." Jack closed his eyes and gripped Ianto's hand, pressing his lips against it even as he continued, "I nearly lost you. Don't throw your life away like I do."

Ianto brushed his cheek with a finger, catching tears, and lifted his face to look at him again. "No more heroics," he promised with a smile. "Not letting you out of my sight again."

Footsteps stopped in the doorway and they both looked up at the young doctor. He smiled at them, but it vanished a moment later when he looked at the notes in his hand. "So, Ianto. Britain's Most Wanted to Britain's Favourite Hero overnight – welcome back. Let's start at the top, shall we? Concussion, probably from insisting on collapsing onto the floor rather than waiting a few seconds and collapsing into Jack's arms ; dislocated thumb and huge lacerations to your hand; gunshot wound through which you bled out; nastily lacerated feet and frostbite; add onto that the dehydration and malnourishment and the fact that people were trying to kill you and I have to ask, how are you still alive?"

Jack's hands were painfully tight around Ianto's, and all Ianto could do was shrug at them. "Determination and luck?"

"Lots of luck." Henson shook his head and looked down at his notes again. "And now, lots of bed rest. You're staying here for at least a week, and then we'll reassess. Welcome home, Ianto; now don't do it again."

Ianto stroked his thumb over Jack's hand and looked up at him. "How did I get here? You were there?"

"Story for another time." Jack patted his hand and made to stand up. "I'll just be a moment..."

"Jack!" Ianto tightened his hand and held Jack in place. "Please... don't..."

"I'm not going anywhere," Jack promised. "Just let me pull the curtains back." He kissed Ianto's hand again and stepped back from the bed. The curtains ran silently on the wooden rails, and tied back with broad belts that looped them to the frame. With the curtains pulled back Ianto could see the crib in the corner of the room and, through the clear sides, the tiny baby wrapped in blankets inside it. "I'm not pregnant anymore ."

"I hadn't noticed," Ianto confessed, staring at the crib. Jack laughed and collected the baby, gazing down at it for a moment, and then brought them over and sat down next to Ianto.

"Is that..."

"Ianto, this is your daughter." He leaned over and laid her down on Ianto's chest so that he could support her with his one good arm. "She's two weeks old. The Doctor took me to a maternity hospital, and I spent three months cursing him and demanding that he bring me home." He reached across and cupped Ianto's cheek. "I came as soon as I could, I promise."

"I know you did." He turned his face into Jack's hand and pressed his lips against his palm. It soon turned into a yawn, and he blinked down at their baby girl. "I'm sorry, I'm so tired."

"Then sleep." Jack rubbed his thumb against Ianto's temple and smiled at him. "You need it – you've earned it. I won't be far away; not ever."

X~X~X~X

It was dark outside when he woke up, and the room was empty and quiet. Fear gripped at him, sending his pulse hammering through his body and stinging through his injuries, and he dragged himself from the bed, supporting himself on furniture and the wall to get to the door. Outside his room was a sitting room that connected the three other rooms in this suite, and in the warm glow of a standard lamp he found Jack, Alice, Steven and his daughter, settled together on one of the sofas. The baby was lying in Steven's lap and Alice was helping him to support her and feed her.

Jack got to his feet as soon as he saw Ianto and wrapped his hands around his elbows to hold him up. "You shouldn't be out of bed," he chastised him, letting Ianto lean on him and gathering him closer. "Oh, Ianto."

He pressed his cheek against Jack's shoulder and clung to him whilst the world swayed. Jack's arms were warm and strong around him, supporting him and protecting even as Jack brought them down to the floor. There were footsteps and voices crowding around them, hands tried to pull him away from Jack and he held on tighter than ever. They retreated at last and left them alone, with Ianto cradled in Jack's arms and becoming aware of the pain through the panic. His side and his feet felt like they were on fire under the layers of bandages around them. Even Jack checking him over, as gentle as he was, was enough to send shockwaves of pain through him. "Fuck..." The fingers of his good hand dug into Jack's arm, and he bit his lip hard enough to taste blood. "Jack!"

"I've got you." One of Jack's hands cupped his cheek and tilted his head back, so that Jack could kiss him on the lips and nuzzle his cheek. "I'm here, I've got you."

Ianto nodded and chased Jack's lips, kissing him back to reassure himself that Jack was there with him. He felt moisture on his cheeks, and when Jack pulled back he realised that it was Jack who was crying, heavy tears rolling unchecked from red-rimmed eyes. "Sorry," he croaked. "Did I..."

"You scared me," Jack finished for him. He brushed his lips across Ianto's cheek, and Ianto felt the wave of warm, moist air when he sighed. "I shouldn't have left you alone. I'm so sorry ."

"You were only just outside," he pointed out, hating himself for the way he'd panicked. "I'm just..." He sighed and rested his cheek against Jack's shoulder again. "Can we get off the floor?"

"Back into bed," Jack agreed. "Alice, can you help us?"

Ianto looked up at last and realised that Alice was still in the room, hovering in the doorway. She hurried over to help Jack get Ianto to his feet, and when he was standing she ran her hands down his arms. "Ianto, you idiot." Before he could respond she hugged him, the swell of her belly between them adding to the awkward sincerity of the gesture. "Thank you.

He smiled back and nodded, dropping his eyes to his feet and leaning against Jack. Between them they got him back to bed, where a nurse was already waiting to take Alice's place and help him to sit up in bed. As soon as he was settled Jack sat down next to him, shuffling them until Ianto was tucked under his arm and curled against his chest, and the nurse merely nodded approvingly. "Mr Jones, you need to stay in bed as much as you can for the next week at least," she told him in a comfortingly familiar Valleys accent, pulling the sheet straight and tucking them in. "Doctor Henson is on his way to check you over again. Is there anything you need?"

"Just Jack," he muttered, avoiding their gazes. "I was just being paranoid."

"That's perfectly understandable," she assured him, "and he's here now. I'll bring your lunch through after Doctor Henson has seen you. I can bring some for you, too, if you like, Captain?"

"Thanks, that would be great," Jack answered for them, before Ianto could protest that he wasn't feeling hungry.

Doctor Henson arrived, pausing to let her out of the room, and looked at the pair of them. "Jack, is there a reason you're in bed with my patient?"

Even though the doctor's expression said that he'd understood. Jack answered, without the playful innocence that Ianto expected, "I'm keeping him warm."

He nodded and made a note on Ianto's charts, lips pursed. "Right. Colonel Oduya wants you to give evidence about Department X, particularly your interactions with Agent Johnson, but I'm going to recommend that you see a therapist before we even consider that. Don't worry, though," he said when Ianto clung to Jack again, "it won't be for some weeks at least. You're in no condition to undergo that level of questioning yet. He will want to speak to you today or tomorrow, though."

His dressings were still safe despite his collapse, and the doctor gave Jack one more admonishment to take care of Ianto and call if anything happened to him, and then left them in the peace and quiet. Now he was sitting upright he could see a glimpse of the garden out of the window, where the first blades of green were pushing through the frozen earth. He settled against Jack and twisted their fingers together. "It's Spring," he commented, "How long did it take?"

"Two months. It must have seemed longer."

"It got blurred," he said with a shrug. "One day after another; I can't remember a lot of it. But I missed so much."

"Dad?" Alice arrived with the baby, and with Steven hiding behind her. "Ianto, are you alright?"

"No," Ianto admitted. "But I'm getting better." He struggled upright and watched as she came into the room with the baby. "Is she asleep?"

"Completely." Alice came around the bed and put her in Jack's arms, where Ianto could lean against him and look down at her. "She's perfect."

"She needs a name." Jack pointed out. "We can't keep calling her 'she'."

Ianto nodded and considered it. "Belle," he said at last. "The victory Belle."

Jack laughed, and her nose scrunched up at the sound. "I think she likes it. Baby Belle Jones.

"Harkness-Jones," he corrected him.

"Belle Harkness-Jones, then." Jack tickled her tummy and shifted her so that she was cradled in one arm and he could wrap the other around Ianto. "What do you think, Steven?"

He peered out from behind Alice, who'd sat down in the chair. "She's tiny," he said, watching her hand emerge from the blankets. "And loud. Belle suits her."

Jack looked at Ianto and whispered in a loud aside, "Apparently you were a bit scary when you found Steven. He thought you were a zombie."

Ianto chuckled and lifted his good hand in a wave. "Still zombie-like?"

The boy shook his head and emerged more from behind Alice. She nodded when he looked up at her, and then he looked back to Ianto. "Thank you, Uncle Ianto."

They were distracted by a mewl from Belle, and Jack looked down at her with discomfort. "Someone's hungry, and I still draw the line at breastfeeding. Alice, can you get a bottle?"

She went, and Ianto looked sidelong at Jack. "Are you saying you can breastfeed as well?"

The nurse stopped in the doorway with their lunch on a tray and peered at them. "This is quite possibly the most surreal conversation I've ever walked into."

X~X~X~X

"I got a first on my last exam," Jane announced, forcing him to open his eyes and pretend to be awake. "I thought you might like to know."

"I'm happy for you." He closed his eyes again and relaxed. "Shouldn't you be… somewhere else?"

She came into the room, the soft rubber soles of her pumps squeaking slightly on the polished, sterilised floor. The flowers she'd brought were strongly scented, and he heard the rustle of the film around them as she set them down on Jack's chair. "I just wanted to make sure you were alright," she told him quietly. "Sarah Jane passed the message on but… it's not the same, is it?"

"No it isn't." He opened one eye and smiled up at her. "Thank you. I'm awake, I promise."

"You shouldn't be," Jack chided from the doorway. "Here, I brought you a coffee. Sorry, it's terrible."

"I'm sure I've had worse." Jane went over towards Jack, and Ianto smirked at the ceiling, waiting for, "No, you were right. Is it definitely coffee?"

"No one would swear to that." It was Jack's heavier footsteps that approached him this time, and then he felt Jack's coffee-warmed fingers against his cheek. "Are you going to stay with us for a while?"

He grunted and tried to nod. "You two talk. I'll listen in."

One chair squeaked, and Jack sat on the edge of the bed, holding Ianto's hand loosely in his own. The silence grew uncomfortable, filled only with Jane shifting in her squeaky seat, until she blurted out, "They've offered me a job in UNIT's press department. They wanted Sarah Jane to be in charge – apparently she knew someone who worked there once – but she says she's too old to get any more jaded, so they're going to hire someone else."

"We need to move more into the open," Jack said softly. "This would never have happened if the public could see it."

"No?" Jane sighed. "I've seen some pretty stupid stuff in the last few years."

The awkwardness returned and Jack broke it by asking about Jane's course, what her family thought of her job offer, whether she was going to move out of Cambridge if she got the chance. Ianto woke up whilst they talked, and by the time she was ready to leave he was able to sit up, propped against the mountain of cushions. "Look after yourself," he told her. "Come back when I can sit through a conversation."

"You can cook me dinner." She clutched her handbag and smiled at him nervously. "I'll see you then, then."

Jack got up to close the door behind her and returned to the edge of the bed again, even though there were now two empty chairs. He straightened the blankets absently. "I'm not used to having to trust people I don't know," he admitted. "Especially not to take care of you."

Ianto stilled his hands and held them between both of his own. "We do what we have to, don't we? Whatever I had to do to come home to you."

Jack closed his eyes and tilted his head down. "I thought I'd got there just in time for you to die in my arms. Once was more than enough, but twice..."

"I'm not coming back," he assured him. Jack's head snapped up, anguish written across his expression, and Ianto hurried to correct himself, "To Torchwood, I mean. I won't put either of us through that again."

Jack relaxed and kissed the back of Ianto's hand. "Good. Time to quit whilst we're ahead."

Ianto spread his fingers between Jack's, and Jack's stretched to join them. "Time to make it official?" He looked up to Jack's face and returned his smile. "Marry me?"

X~X~X~X

A Red Kite wheeled high above the farm, its striking silhouette framed by the expanse of clear blue that stretched unbroken from horizon to horizon. Closer to the ground swallows wheeled and dived between the farm buildings and across the meadow, so low that their wing-tips skimmed the long grass and blew pollen from the nodding flowers. At the bottom of the meadow the stream chuckled over its rocky bed in the shade of the willows and blackthorn that grew on the bank, and carried cherry blossom down the valley towards the town. The distant cries of sheep on the hillsides echoed off the old stone walls in the farmyard, making them seem much closer than they were, and the only other sound to break the peace was the occasional arthritic grumble from the reluctant engine of an antique Land Rover.

Ianto's wedding ring clinked against the spanner in his hand as he raised it to wipe sweat from his forehead. Across the yard, in the shade of the farm buildings, Steven watched over Belle and his baby brother John, who were asleep on the blanket with Tybalt guarding them like a Sphinx. Alice leaned out of the cab of the Land Rover to watch them working. "You're going to have to admit defeat sooner or later," she called, laughing. "And then go for a bath."

"We're not admitting defeat," Jack told her, dropping the bonnet and leaning on it. "We're just taking a break until I've gone into town to get some parts."

"Sure." She glanced at Ianto and swung out of the car. "Are we breaking for lunch, then?"

Jack held up his hand and looked behind him, towards the lane to the farm. "There's someone coming."

Ianto wiped his hands off on a rag and followed Jack to the gate across the yard. Chickens scattered as they approached, squawking their way across the yard towards the open barn doors, and he stepped over a confused duck. It wasn't long before he could hear the rumble of the engine approaching, and then the glint of a car roof appeared over the high walls before a sleek sedan rounded the corner and pulled up in front of the gate. They exchanged glances and leaned on the gate, keeping it closed. "Have you been led down here by your sat-nav?" he asked the woman who got out of the car.

"I've come from Torchwood." She approached the gate and stopped a short distance away from them. "We have a situation in Cardiff, and we need your help, Captain Harkness."

He straightened up and looked over at Ianto as he asked, "What sort of a situation?"

"We've detected a munitions factory, but the technology is beyond our abilities to deal with. It's in the middle of a residential suburb, and we don't know whether we can risk leaving or transporting it if we mount a raid." She raised her chin and fixed her gaze on Jack. "We need you."

Jack nodded and pushed off the gate to turn to Ianto, and rested his hands on Ianto's waist. "Will you be alright without me? I'll come straight back."

"No." He looked over at her and nodded. "We'll come as consultants for the duration of the situation, at the usual rate." Jack grinned and Ianto squeezed his arms. "You talk terms and get details, I'll pack. Invoice it from Harkness-Jones consultancy."

"Yes, Sir."

"Prat." He leaned in to kiss Jack before he pulled out of his grasp. "You weren't really going to go without me, were you?"

"Wouldn't dream of it." Jack let him go and turned back to their guest. "So... tell me everything you know."


End file.
